FreeBSD Archive

Some people already submitted this news last week, but it wasn't until today that it became official: the FreeBSD team has announced the release of FreeBSD version 9.0. As you may expect from the major version number change, this is releas eis packed with new stuff.

"The first RC build for the FreeBSD-9.0 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the architectures amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites. One of the many new features in 9.0 we would like to be tested is the new installer, so we encourage our users to do fresh installation on test systems. Alternatively, users upgrading existing systems may now do so using the freebsd-update(8) utility."

"How long have you been using FreeBSD. Months? Years? Decades? And you love using it because of whatever reason but at the same time you're feeling a bit guilty to use it all for free without giving anything back? Well now you'll have the chance to change that. We at FreeBSD are always in need of new people who are willing to spare some of their time and effort into FreeBSD development."

PC-BSD 8.2 has been released. As the name suggests, this version's based on FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE, and includes KDE 4.5.5, as well as various other bugxes and updates.

"The FreeBSD developers have made available a second release candidate (RC2) for FreeBSD 7.4. This is a precursor to a third release candidate, due next week, as the developers say that there are "several bugs we feel are critical enough to warrant fixing before the 8.2/7.4 releases are finalized". FreeBSD 8.2 saw its second release candidate made available last week."

Ken Smith officially announced the availability of FreeBSD 8.2-RC2 on the freebsd-stable mailing list. This is the second iteration of Release Candidates which will soon lead to 8.2-RELEASE. An updated release schedule may be found on the FreeBSD wiki.

FreeBSD developer Colin Percival announced on his blog today that FreeBSD 9-CURRENT now runs on Amazon EC2. A number of FreeBSD developers have contributed to this project. "There are some caveats to this. First, at the moment only FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT can run under EC2; I haven't merged bug fixes back to the stable branches. Second, at the moment FreeBSD only runs on t1.micro instances, for reasons I can't discuss (NDA) but hope will be resolved soon. Third, this code hasn't received very much testing and is almost certain to have more serious bugs, so it should be approached as an experimental, not-ready-for-production-use system for now. "

"This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between July and September 2010. It is the third of the four reports planned for 2010. During this period, we were victims of one of the biggest BSD events of the year - EuroBSDCon. We hope that the ones of you who have been able to attend it have enjoyed your stay. Another good news is that work on the new minor versions of FreeBSD, 7.4 and 8.2, is progressing well."

Max Khon has completed the DAHDI Project and provides the following report: "I am pleased to announce the completion of the DAHDI/FreeBSD project. DAHDI (Digium/Asterisk Hardware Device Interface) is an open-source device driver framework and a set of HW drivers for E1/T1, ISDN digital and FXO/FXS analog cards. The main goal of this funded project was to make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions."

FreeBSD is getting support for USB 3.0. "Commit initial version of new XHCI driver which was written from scratch. This driver adds support for USB3.0 devices. The XHCI interface is also backwards compatible to USB2.0 and USB1.0 and will eventually replace the OHCI/UHCI and EHCI drivers."

"The first of the test builds for the FreeBSD 8.1 release cycle is now available for amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. Files suitable for creating installation media or doing FTP based installs through the network should be on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites by now."

Today Jeff Roberson committed his patches to FreeBSD 9 for adding journaling to UFS. No more background fsck after unclean shutdowns! This is a major landmark in the history of UFS, with 11000 new lines of code (and about 2000 removed). Much of the work was done in collaboration with Kirk McKusick, the original author of FFS and Softupdates, under sponsorship form Yahoo!, Juniper and iXsystems. Jeff's blog contains quite a lot of technical information of his work. There's also information on the FreeBSD mailing lists.

The FreeBSD team has released FreeBSD 7.3, the fourth release of the 7-STABLE branch. There will be one more release in this branch, but at this point, most developers are already working on the 8-STABLE branch. FreeBSD 7.3 focusses on bug fixes, but has a few new features as well.

Why was it not FreeBSD but Linux that became the most popular open source Unix-like operating system? Richard Hillesley traces the history of FreeBSD and examines how FreeBSD, and Linux, their different cultures and preferred licenses affected the open source world. "The BSD hackers have an aphorism that speaks some truths, which says: 'BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.' This aphorism speaks of a difference in the cultures that is greater than the words contained within it."