This is the release schedule for FreeBSD 8.3. For more information about the release engineering process, please see the Release Engineering section of the web site.
General discussions about the pending release and known issues should be sent to the public freebsd-stable mailing list.
| Action | Expected | Actual | Description |
| Initial release schedule announcement | - | 25 January 2012 | Release Engineers send announcement email to developers with a rough schedule. |
| Code freeze begins | 15 February 2012 | 15 February 2012 | Release Engineers announce that all further commits to the stable/8 branch will require explicit approval. Certain blanket approvals will be granted for narrow areas of development, documentation improvements, etc. |
| BETA1 | 17 February 2012 | 20 February 2012 | First beta test snapshot. |
| releng/8.3 branch | - | 3 March 2012 | Subversion branch created, propagated to CVS; future release engineering proceeds on this branch. |
| RC1 | 02 March 2012 | 06 March 2012 | First release candidate. |
| RC2 | 16 March 2012 | 2 April 2012 | Second release candidate. |
| RELEASE build | 9 April 2012 | 9 April 2012 | 8.3-RELEASE build. |
| RELEASE announcement | - | 18 April 2012 | 8.3-RELEASE press release. |
| Turn over to the secteam | - | - | releng/8.3 branch is handed over to the FreeBSD Security Officer Team in one or two weeks after the announcement. |