Submitted by Even though FreeBSD 7.x is already out and updated, the FreeBSD team keeps working on the FreeBSD 6.x branch, now designated the legacy branch. They released FreeBSD 6.4 today, with lots of new features, fixes, and updates. They are expecting FreeBSD 6.4 to be the last release in the 6.x branch.
The highlights of the release are listed as follows:
- New and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client
- Support for the Camellia cipher
- boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices with GPT-enabled BIOSes
- DVD install ISO images for amd64/i386
- KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3
- Updates for BIND, sendmail, OpenPAM, and others
The complete release notes are of course also available, as is the errata list. This release is supposed to be supported by the security team until November 30th, 2010. Using torrents for downloading this release is usually preferred, but you can of course also check your local mirror.
And I should note that now that 6.4-RELEASE is out, the focus is on getting to 7.1-RC1.
7.1 will get two RC releases, probably couple of weeks between them and will then get to RELEASE status as well. Assuming of course no sudden problems arise. Not that anything serious is expected, 7.1-PRERELEASE is really stable at the moment.
i wanted to install freebsd 7.1, but ended up installing the beta. could anyone shed some light about why 7.1 is so late? being 2 months late is really unusual. and annoying for me, since i bought hardware to be installed after the 7.1 release.
Well, FreeBSD is a volunteer project, delays are sometimes unavoidable. 7.1-PRERELEASE is very stable atm, and if you don’t mind the make buildworld buildkernel stuff, you can start using it immediately. If you’d rather not build from source, I suggest you wait a few more days, the 7.1-RC CD set will be out soon.
Various show-stopper bugs were found, requiring fixing, testing, and re-testing. A couple security issues were found with 6+ that also required fixing, testing, and re-testing. A few big MFCs were allowed in, which also required extra testing and retesting. Finally, everything has solidified to the point where everyone on the RE team is confident it’s ready for final RC testing.
IOW, life happened.
I would rather a delay and a solid release. that being said I track RELENG_7, so waiting for specific releases within that branch can easily be avoided if your concern is the update from beta to the final release. Follow either the above tag or RELENG_7_1 with csup and make buildworld..
I have been running 6.4-PRERELEASE for a month now on my PIII-800mhz server
. So far so good. Now on with csup. Thanks fbsd!
Yeah, I’ve been running 6-STABLE for quite some time now on a low traffic production SMTP server at work. Runs great and I have 144 days of uptime. I guess finally upgrading to RELENG_6_4 is going to kill that though. Oh well. I’m glad it’s finally here though. I’m csup’ing now.