FreeBSD Archive

FreeBSD 7.0 has been released. "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the 7-STABLE branch which introduces many new features along with many improvements to functionality present in the earlier branches."

"FreeBSD is back to its incredible performance and now can take advantage of multi-core/CPUs systems very well... So well that some benchmarks on both Intel and AMD systems showed release 7.0 being faster than Linux 2.6 when running PostreSQL or MySQL. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed two dozen developers to discuss all the cool details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more."

The FreeBSD project has released the second release candidate for FreeBSD 7.0. "We sincerely hope this will be the last of the public tests for 7.0 and that the -RELEASE builds will start in about a week and a half. If bug(s) considered big enough to be show-stoppers are found we will of course reconsider but hopefully we're in good enough shape now to proceed with the release."

"In December 2003, I wrote a script for remotely upgrading a linux system to FreeBSD. I gave it a catchy name ('Depenguinator', inspired by the 'Antichickenator' in Baldur's Gate), announced it on a FreeBSD mailing list and on Slashdot, and before long it was famous. Unfortunately, it didn't take long for changes in the layout of FreeBSD releases to make the Depenguination script stop working; so for the past three years I have been receiving emails asking me to update it to work with newer FreeBSD releases." And now it's back.

DesktopBSD 1.6 has been released. These are the most notable features introduced: "FreeBSD 6 as a modern and reliable base system. X.Org release 7.3, improving support for modern graphics hardware. Live CD/DVD feature for testing the system without installation to a hard-drive. Revised installer supporting upgrades from 1.0 and previous 1.6 release candidates. Improved package manager usability and performance. Many enhancements and bugfixes for the DesktopBSD tools. Support for multiple processors and multi-core CPUs. Inclusion of the NVIDIA graphics driver for hardware 3D rendering. DesktopBSD build servers as an up-to-date source for precompiled packages" Download.

FreeBSD 6.3-RC2 has been released. "Sorry for the delay with this phase of the 6.3 release. A few glitches were found during testing of the 6.3-RC2 ISOs that included pre-built packages. The 6.3-RC2 builds for amd64 and i386 should now be available on the majority of the FreeBSD mirror sites. I just finished loading the sparc64 build so that will take a little while to propagate to the mirrors. This is the last planned RC for 6.3. Unless a major show-stopper problem is found the release of 6.3 should happen in about two weeks."

There is a new edition of the FreeBSD Foundation newsletter. "The innovation of the past lives on in FreeBSD. From SMP and network scalability to innovations in security APIs and wireless networking, the technology of FreeBSD is making an impact on our world. What future piece of BSD technology will help foster a new public commodity like the Internet? I can't say, but the past shows us that investing in open source OS development and its commercial use pays large dividends. The two testimonials in this newsletter from Isilon and Network Appliance show this process at work."

"The 7.0-BETA4 builds are now available. If you would like to use cvsup to update an older machine the branch tag to use is still RELENG_7. For users of FreeBSD Update due to some last-minute bumps in system libraries, installed third-party applications must be recompiled as per normal for a 'major' upgrade, even if upgrading from an earlier 7.0 BETA."

The second beta of FreeBSD 7 has been released. "The 7.0-BETA2 builds have completed and are on many of the FreeBSD mirror sites. If you want to update an existing machine using cvsup use RELENG_7 as the branch tag. Instructions on using FreeBSD Update to perform a binary upgrade from FreeBSD 6.x to 7.0-BETA2 will be provided via the freebsd-stable list when available." Additionally, there's a discussion on supporting a subset of c++ in the FreeBSD kernel.

"FreeBSD 7.0 will be the next release of FreeBSD, and is the first major release in 2 years. It's due out some time later this year (currently in pre-release and available for testing). FreeBSD 7.0 brings major changes to the BSD and open source operating system landscape." This document describes all the changes.

"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between July and October 2007. The sixth EuroBSDCon was held in Denmark in September. The Google Summer of Code project came to a close and lots of participants are working getting their code merged back into FreeBSD. The bugs in the FreeBSD HEAD branch are being shaked out and it is being prepared for the FreeBSD 7 branching."

"The FreeBSD Project is proud to have taken part in the Google Summer of Code 2007. We received more high quality applications this year than ever before. In the end it was a very tough decision to narrow it down to the 25 students selected for funding by Google. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program. We are happy to report that all students made some progress towards their goals for the summer, and the 22 students listed below completed the program successfully."

"Welcome to the home page of the finstall project, accepted for Google's Summer of Code 2007. This project aims to create a user-friendly graphical installer for FreeBSD & FreeBSD-derived systems. The project should yield something usable for 7.0-RELEASE, but the intention is to keep it as a "second" installer system during 7.x, alongside sysinstall. In any case, sysinstall will be kept for architectures not supported by finstall (e.g. all except i386 and amd64)." A first version has been released.

The next major release of FreeBSD, version 7, is one of the most significant so far, with amount of new technologies and improvement largest since introduction of 5.0. Since constantly searching the mailing lists for important changes can be a bit tedious, this page lists some of the more interesting new things in one place.