FreeBSD Archive

"We have now reached the Release Candidate stage of the FreeBSD 6.2 release cycle. A few significant problems had been discovered during the initial BETA testing and those issues should now be fixed. RC1 is the first of two planned Release Candidate builds. If no more significant problems are reported 6.2-RELEASE builds will be done after RC2."

"The FreeBSD Foundation is kicking off its Fall Fundraising Campaign! The success of this effort will have a large impact on our budget for next year. There are many ways that you can help us meet our goal of raising over USD 200000."

BETA3 for the FreeBSD 6.2 release is now available on most of the FTP mirror sites. There have been a lot of fixes to many things since BETA2. The most important of the things that have been worked on is the driver for em(4). More info here.

The FreeBSD Project has announced their status report for the third quarter of 2006. This report covers topics such as GJournal, Xen, DTrace, ZFS, iSCSI and the ARM port. Also, there is a lot of information about upcoming BSD conferences.

"Virtual Bridges, a provider of enterprise and SMB solutions using virtualization for business, announced today the release of Win4BSD Pro Desktop Win4BSD Pro Desktop runs as a FreeBSD/PC-BSD application and allows users to run Windows applications and desktops with seamless ease on the BSD platform. The company also announced that it will be releasing Win4BSD Virtual Desktop Server, a FreeBSD-based desktop consolidation server, during October."

The first Beta build for the FreeBSD-6.2 Release Cycle is now available on most of the FTP mirror sites. If the release cycle goes as planned it is the first of two BETAs, which will be followed by two Release Candidates (RCs) and then the final release.

This chapter explains the ins and outs of non-standard FreeBSD installations. If you are installing FreeBSD on a system with another operating system previously installed, or if you aren't using a CD or DVD to install FreeBSD, you'll want to read this chapter before performing the installation.

The FreeBSD project has elected its new core team. "I am pleased to announce the results of the 2006 FreeBSD core team election. Congratulations to Wilko, George, Hiroki, Brooks and Giorgos who will be joining the core team, and of course to Robert, Warner, Murray and Wes who retain their seats. Our thanks also must go to Peter, John, Scott, Mark and Jun for all their hard work over the last two years."

Joel Dahl, FreeBSD developer: "FreeBSD development is fast these days and reading CVS commit mails is a time consuming task, but almost always both fun and interesting. However, somewhat secret, the really interesting stuff can be found in the Perforce repository. This is where all the cool projects are maintained, and the daily activity is quite high." It's a summary of all the 'secret' development they have in their perforce repository. It mentions DTrace, Xen, FreeBSD/ARM, FreeBSD/MIPS, a new USB system, and sun4v development, for example.

In a mail to the FreeBSD hackers mailing-list, a very detailed request is made from Christian Zander at Nvidia, concerning several missing features in the FreeBSD kernel. In order for Nvidia to provide improved OpenGL performance and SLI support in the future for FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/amd64, several important tasks needs to be completed.

FlightAware uses FreeBSD/amd64 systems to track the locations of up to 70000 flights per day. Will Backman speaks with Karl Lehenbauer about how FlightAware is successfully using FreeBSD with other open source technologies to drive their product.

Jeremie Le Hen has created some ProPolice patches for FreeBSD 6.x and 7-CURRENT. ProPolice is a gcc extension written by Hiroaki Etoh for IBM that tries to prevent stack-smashing attacks. You can find the announcement of the patches here, more info about ProPolice on the IBM ProPolice page, and you can download the FreeBSD patches from here.

Sun dtrace developer Bryan Cantrill reports on the progress being made by John Birrel on porting dtrace to FreeBSD. "While John has quite a bit further to go before one could call it a complete port, what he has now is indisputably useful. If you run FreeBSD in production, you're going to want John's port as it stands today - and if you develop for the FreeBSD kernel (drivers or otherwise), you're going to need it (once you've done kernel development with DTrace, there's no going back)."

"It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.5-RELEASE. Work done between the 5.4-RELEASE and this release has mostly been bugfixes. Some 'vendor supplied' software has also been updated, mostly due to security concerns (specifically BIND and sendmail). This is the last planned release on the 5-STABLE branch."