FreeBSD 7.1 now available!
Software
Getting FreeBSD 7.1 torrenty goodness!
You know why January is the best time of the year? Is it because of snow? You moron, I live in Singapore! The closest we get to snow here is the white powdery condensate you scape out of the freezer. Unless your freezer is one of those frost free models, in which case I'm stumped.
Yes folks, FreeBSD 7.1 RELEASE is out now and ready for downloading. It has some exciting new features, one of which is the ability to download one DVD ISO instead of several regular CD-Rs, very nice. And I can't wait to finally give DTRACE a try!
From the official announcement page:
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:
- The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads.
- Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework.
- A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client.
- Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.
- The cpuset(2) system call and cpuset(1) command have been added, providing an API for thread to CPU binding and CPU resource grouping and assignment.
- KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3.
- DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures
For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:
For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see:
I think sometimes with free and open source computer software we tend to forget that there are some tireless folks behind all this good stuff, and they don't get the recognition they deserve.
In this case I want to personally thank Ken Smith, Robert Watson, Konstantin Belousov, Marc Fonvieille, Maxime Henrion, Bruce A. Mah, George Neville-Neil, Hiroki Sato, Murray Stokely, Marcel Moolenaar, Takahashi Yoshihiro, Kris Kennaway, Joe Marcus Clarke, Erwin Lansing, Mark Linimon, Pav Lucistnik, Colin Percival and Peter Wemm for their work on 7.1.
I also want to send my gratitude and thanks to the rest of the FreeBSD team for continuing to craft this masterpiece of computer science. You folks create the single greatest piece of software on the planet, and you've made all my FreeBSD machines such fun, reliable, secure, fast and dependable devices to use.
Thank you again!
