2026-02-18 - FreeBSD Containers

Did yall know that FreeBSD shipped containers?

https://hub.docker.com/u/freebsd

I was confused so I started looking into it but I couldn't find anything right away on the web. After using their site search I did end up finding this:

https://people.freebsd.org/~dch/posts/2024-12-04-freebsd-containers/

The relevant section being:

14.2-RELEASE now includes OCI-compatible images, and the Podman toolkit on FreeBSD is ready to use them, on both amd64 and arm64 systems.

So this is cool! Can I pull them down and run them on my Mac? Well unfortunately, no. These images are tagged with "platform.os = freebsd" so they won't run on a Linux or Darwin host.

$ skopeo inspect docker://docker.io/freebsd/freebsd-toolchain:15.snap --raw | jq
{
  "schemaVersion": 2,
  "mediaType": "application/vnd.oci.image.index.v1+json",
  "manifests": [
    {
      "mediaType": "application/vnd.oci.image.manifest.v1+json",
      "digest": "sha256:52037ef1d2d3fa20c1fe47aaa4a11bcdb55768eba14547e9d00f209ab4b821a8",
      "size": 407,
      "platform": {
        "architecture": "arm64",
        "os": "freebsd"
      }
    },
    {
      "mediaType": "application/vnd.oci.image.manifest.v1+json",
      "digest": "sha256:6dc35981f64742939ed5baeb20f113591416231aa226643010912e9706baa841",
      "size": 407,
      "platform": {
        "architecture": "amd64",
        "os": "freebsd"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Still nifty tho!