FreeBSD 9.0 released

Following several delays, the FreeBSD Project has announced the availability of version 9.0 of its open source FreeBSD operating system. The first stable 9.x branch release is a major update that includes a new FreeBSD installer system and a number of infrastructure enhancements.

FreeBSD 9.0 offers a choice of either GNOME 2.32.1 or KDE SC 4.7.3 as the distribution's desktop environment, and includes a new Clang/LLVM-based compilation system, user-level DTrace support and more SMP-scalable TCP/IP. High Performance SSH (HPN-SSH) is supported and the updated Network File System (NFS) subsystem implementation adds support for version 4 of the protocol. Other changes include the addition of support for USB 3.0 and the Sony PlayStation 3's PowerPC architecture. Various drivers have also been upgraded and ZFS has been updated to version 28 .

The FreeBSD developers have dedicated the 9.0 release to the memory of the late Dennis M. Ritchie, the American computer scientist who created the C programming language and was one of the founding fathers of the UNIX operating system. Ritchie passed away in October 2011.

Further information can be found in the official release announcement and in the release notes. FreeBSD 9.0 is available to download from the project's site and installation instructions are provided. Source code for FreeBSD is licensed under the two-clause BSD license.

See also:

• FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE Available, FreeBSD mailing list announcement.
• Health Check: FreeBSD - "The unknown giant", a feature from The H.

(crve)