First release candidate for FreeBSD 9.0 arrives

The FreeBSD project has announced the arrival of the first release candidate (RC1) for version 9.0 of its FreeBSD operating system. The developers say that 9.0 RC1 was delayed due to a bug that the team encountered during the initial testing of the images, as well as problems related to FreeBSD-Update.

Aimed at testers, developers and early adopters, the Release Engineering Team asks users to test the new FreeBSD installer by doing fresh installations on test systems. FreeBSD 9.0 includes a number of infrastructure enhancements, such as a new Clang/LLVM based compilation system. Other changes include updates to ZFS, support for over 32 CPUs and USB 3.0, and updates to ZFS. Initial NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) support has also been added. More details can be found in Ivan Voras' "What's cooking for FreeBSD 9".

At the time of writing, the FreeBSD 9.0 Release Process Schedule still lists the RC1 as expected at the end of August; however, the developers say that they will update it "soon". According to the release schedule, the first RC will be followed by two more release candidates, with the final version expected in mid-November.

Further information about this first RC can be found in the mailing list release announcement and in the release notes. FreeBSD 9.0 RC1 is available to download from the project's site and is licensed under the two-clause BSD licence. Use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter. The current stable release is FreeBSD 8.2.

See also:

• FreeBSD 8.2 and 7.4 released, a report from The H.
• Health Check: FreeBSD - "The unknown giant", a feature from The H.

(crve)