This is the release schedule for FreeBSD 8.4. 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 | - | 08 February 2013 | Release Engineers send announcement email to developers with a rough schedule. |
| Announce doc/ tree slush | - | 28 February 2013 | Notification of the impending doc/ tree slush should be sent to doc@. |
| Code freeze begins | 08 March 2013 | 08 March 2013 | 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 | 20 March 2013 | 22 March 2013 | First beta test snapshot. |
| doc/ tree slush | 17 March 2013 | 17 March 2013 | Non-essential commits to the en_US.ISO8859-1/ subtree should be delayed from this point until after the doc/ tree tagging, to give translation teams time to synchronize their work. |
| ports/ tree freeze | 30 March 2013 | 30 March 2013 | Only security updates and critical fixes will be allowed to the tree during this freeze. |
| releng/8.4 branch | 18 March 2013 | 28 March 2013 | Subversion branch created, propagated to CVS; future release engineering proceeds on this branch. |
| RC1 | 30 March 2013 | 10 April 2013 | First release candidate. |
| RC2 | 21 April 2013 | 22 April 2013 | Second release candidate. |
| RC3 | 30 April 2013 | 8 May 2013 | Third release candidate. |
| RELEASE build | 02 June 2013 | 02 June 2013 | 8.4-RELEASE build. |
| RELEASE announcement | 07 June 2013 | 07 June 2013 | 8.4-RELEASE press release. |
| Turn over to the secteam | - | 16 June 2013 | releng/8.4 branch is handed over to the FreeBSD Security Officer Team in one or two weeks after the announcement. |