After years of deliberate vagueness, equivocation, and (IMO) no small amount of outright dishonesty[1], iX have finally admitted what many of us suspected for quite some time, which is that they’re killing CORE. There will be no CORE 14, nor any other future releases of CORE, except for (possibly) what’s needed to address security vulnerabilities.
iX has been recommending for years that new deployments use SCALE, and that existing deployments plan to migrate to SCALE. They’ve more recently said that the next release of SCALE will mark the end of CORE:
However, jails are a FreeBSD thing. If you want or need your jails to start up and run, you’ll need to install CORE, and then plan to migrate to SCALE ASAP.
OTOH, the data in your jails and their software is still on your pool. If all you need is that data, I’d recommend just making the move to SCALE. See also:
Specifically, when SCALE was first announced, they repeatedly and explicitly promised that this wouldn’t take away from CORE, CORE development would continue uninterrupted, etc. It’s since become clear this was false, and it’s very hard to believe they ever thought otherwise. ↩︎