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FreeBSD News

FreeBSD is a rapidly developing operating system. Keeping up on the latest developments can be a chore! To keep on top of things, be sure and check this page periodically. Also, you may wish to subscribe to the freebsd-announce mailing list or the RSS feed.

The following projects have their own news pages, which should be checked for project specific updates.

For a detailed description of past, present, and future releases, see the Release Information page.

For FreeBSD Security Advisories, please refer to the Security Information page.

March 2007

  • 14 March: The FreeBSD Project is now accepting applications for the Google Summer of Code 2007 program. This program will provide funding for students to spend the summer contributing to open source software projects. A list of FreeBSD specific projects and potential mentors is available here.

    Once a suitable project and mentor have been identified, interested students should complete a proposal and submit it to Google. Proposals are now being accepted and the final deadline is March 24, 2007. Please see the Google FAQ for more information.

  • 12 March: FreeBSD 7-CURRENT and 6-STABLE snapshot releases for March 2007 now available. The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team issues snapshot releases to encourage users to test new features and improve the reliability. For more details, please visit the snapshots page.

  • 11 March: Michael Bushkov, a successful student from last year's Summer of Code program, has continued working with the FreeBSD Project and is now a full src/ committer.

  • 10 March: Recently there has been significant progress on optimizing FreeBSD 7.0 for MySQL running an 8-core amd64 system. Under the test workload FreeBSD has peak performance consistent with Linux, and outperforms it by a factor of 4 under higher loads. Continue reading for a more detailed report here.

  • 7 March: The FreeBSD project has reached an agreement with Intel about the redistribution of firmware images for Intel wireless cards. Please refer to the press release for more information.

February 2007

  • 27 February: Information about how the change in Daylight Savings Time for some time zones affects FreeBSD releases.

  • 23 February: Enhanced commit privileges: Remko Lodder (doc,src)

  • 16 February: New committer: Stephane E. Potvin (src)

  • 10 February: New committer: Benjamin Close (src)

  • 9 February: In his latest bsdtalk podcast, Will Backman interviews FreeBSD Developer George V. Neville-Neil about the upcoming AsiaBSDCon conference. http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk099.mp3.

  • 8 February: AsiaBSDCon, the BSD conference for Asia, has posted its schedule of tutorials, papers and presentations for the conference, taking place in Tokyo from March 8th through 11th 2007. The complete schedule can be found here.

    Registration will begin on or about the 12th of February.

  • 2 February: Enhanced commit privileges: Gábor Kövesdán (doc, ports)

January 2007

  • 31 January: Enhanced commit privileges: Rong-En Fan (src, ports)

  • 18 January: New committer: Diane Bruce (ports)

  • 16 January: The October-December, 2006 Status Report is now available with 41 entries.

  • 15 January: FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE has been released. Please check the release errata before installation for any late-breaking news and/or issues with 6.2. The Release Information page has more information about FreeBSD releases.

  • 9 January: Under the supervision of FreeBSD developer Gábor Kövesdán, the Hungarian translation goes live. This official translation, completed by the Hungarian FreeBSD Documentation Project, adds support for documentation in another language. For more information about the ongoing work of the HFDP team, please refer to the Translations page of the FreeBSD Documentation Project.

December 2006

November 2006

  • 29 November: New committer: David Thiel (ports)

  • 29 November: In his latest bsdtalk podcast, Will Backman interviews FreeBSD Release Engineer Bruce Mah about the upcoming 6.2 release of FreeBSD. The podcast is available at http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk084.mp3.

  • 17 November: The first release candidate of FreeBSD 6.2 is now available. ISO images for Tier-1 architectures are now available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

  • 16 November: The FreeBSD Foundation is kicking off its Fall Fundraising Campaign. The success of this effort will have a large impact on the Foundations budget for the next year.

  • 14 November: The move of the FreeBSD.org systems which was scheduled for Monday November 13th has been postponed. Currently it is expected to happen on Friday November 17th (still US Pacific Standard Time).

  • 12 November: The port of FreeBSD to Sun's UltraSparc-T1 architecture has produced an install ISO containing a live file system. More information is available at the FreeBSD/sun4v Project page.

  • 12 November: New committer: Jeremy Chadwick (ports)

  • 7 November: New committer: Babak Farrokhi (ports)

  • 7 November: New committer: Frank J. Laszlo (ports)

  • 5 November: The FreeBSD.org servers handling mail, web, CVS etc. for the FreeBSD Project will be moving to a new data-center soon. The move is currently scheduled to take place on Monday November 13th (US Pacific Standard Time).

    Due to preparations for the move there may be short outages when FreeBSD.org services are not working in the time up to the actual move. On the day of the move only the static parts (IE. plain HTML pages, no CGI) of http://www.FreeBSD.org/ will work.

October 2006

  • 31 October: The third beta release of FreeBSD 6.2 is now available. ISO images for Tier-1 architectures are now available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

  • 25 October: We are happy to report that all 14 students successfully completed their FreeBSD Summer of Code projects. Congratulations to both mentors and students, and thanks to Google for running this program and providing funding.

  • 19 October: The June-October, 2006 Status Report is now available with 49 entries.

  • 14 October: GNOME 2.16.1 has been released, and merged into the FreeBSD ports tree. Check out the FreeBSD GNOME homepage for the official announcement as well as important upgrade instructions.

  • 8 October: New committer: Shteryana Shopova (src)

  • 5 October: The second beta release of FreeBSD 6.2 is now available. ISO images for Tier-1 architectures are now available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

September 2006

August 2006

July 2006

June 2006

May 2006

  • 30 May: The FreeBSD Project received over 120 applications for Google's Summer of Code program, amongst which 14 were selected for funding. Unfortunately, there were far more first rate applications than available spots for students. However, we encourage students to work together with us all year round. The FreeBSD Project is always willing to help mentor students learn more about operating system development through our normal community mailing lists and development forums. Contributing to an open source software project is a valuable component of a computer science education and great preparation for a career in software development.

    A complete list of the winning students and projects is available here. A Summer of Code wiki is also available with additional information.

  • 30 May: Paolo Pisati, a successful student from last year's Summer of Code program, has continued working with the FreeBSD Project and is now a full src/ committer.

  • 26 May: In his latest bsdtalk podcast, Will Backman interviews FreeBSD developer Poul-Henning Kamp about his work on FreeBSD. The podcast is available at http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk048.mp3.

  • 25 May: FreeBSD 5.5-RELEASE is now available. Please check the errata before installation for any late-breaking news and/or issues with this release. The Release Information page has more information about FreeBSD releases.

  • 21 May: FreeBSD is now able to complete a full run of the "make buildworld" command on machines running the Sun T1 processor with CoolThreads technology, and is thus self-hosting. The code currently resides in the FreeBSD Perforce revision control system and will be merged to the official CVS repository when support for logical domaining is complete. A log file of the boot process can be found here.

  • 17 May: New committer: Thomas Wintergerst (src)

  • 16 May: The first and most likely last release candidate of FreeBSD 5.5 is now available. The RC1 ISO images are available on most of the FreeBSD Mirror sites.

  • 8 May: FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE has been released. Please check the release errata before installation for any late-breaking news and/or issues with 6.1. The Release Information page has more information about FreeBSD releases.

  • 8 May: The application period for Google's Summer of Code 2006 program has been extended until Tuesday 11:00AM PDT. More information about FreeBSD specific projects and potential mentors is available here.

  • 7 May: New committer: Ion-Mihai Tetcu (ports)

  • 6 May: New committer: Stefan Walter (ports)

  • 6 May: New committer: Andrew Pantyukhin (ports)

  • 2 May: The second and most likely last release candidate of FreeBSD 6.1 is now available. The RC2 ISO images are available on most of the FreeBSD Mirror sites.

  • 1 May: The FreeBSD Project is now accepting applications for the previously announced Google Summer of Code 2006 program. This program will provide funding for students to spend the summer contributing to open source software projects. A list of FreeBSD specific projects and potential mentors is available here.

    Once a suitable project and mentor have been identified, interested students should complete a proposal and submit it to Google. Proposals are now being accepted and the final deadline is May 8, 2006 at 17:00 Pacific Daylight Time (midnight May 9, 2006 0:00 UTC). Winning candidates will be announced in late May. Please see the Student FAQ for more information.

  • 1 May: A driver for HighPoint's RocketRAID 232x series of SATA RAID controllers, rr232x(4), has been added to FreeBSD-CURRENT as well as the RELENG_6 and RELENG_6_1 branches. It will be included in the upcoming FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE.

  • 1 May: Enhanced commit privileges: Xin LI (src, doc, ports)

April 2006

  • 30 April: New committer: Lars Balker Rasmussen (ports)

  • 15 April: In his latest bsdtalk podcast, Will Backman interviews FreeBSD developer Joe Marcus Clarke about the GNOME desktop environment on FreeBSD. The podcast is available at http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk032.mp3.

  • 14 April: The January-March, 2006 status report is now available with 29 entries.

  • 14 April: The FreeBSD Project is happy to participate in Google's Summer of Code 2006 program. This program will provide funding for students to spend the summer contributing to open source software projects. A list of FreeBSD specific projects and potential mentors is available here.

  • 13 April: The first release candidate of FreeBSD 6.1 is now available. The RC1 ISO images are available on most of the FreeBSD Mirror sites.

  • 11 April: A driver for the Broadcom NetXtreme II family of Gigabit Ethernet chips, bce(4), has been added to FreeBSD-CURRENT. It will be merged to the FreeBSD 6-STABLE branch in the near future.

  • 6 April: The FreeBSD Foundation now provides native Java JDK and JRE 1.5 binaries for FreeBSD. For further details, please see the FreeBSD Foundation press release.

  • 4 April: New committer: Alejandro Pulver (ports)

  • 2 April: New committer: Johan van Selst (ports)

March 2006

February 2006

  • 22 February: New committer: Wojciech A. Koszek (src)

  • 20 February: The second beta releases of FreeBSD 5.5 and FreeBSD 6.1 are now available. The respective BETA2 ISO images are available on most of the FreeBSD Mirror sites.

  • 18 February: In his latest bsdtalk podcast, Will Backman interviews FreeBSD developer Marshall Kirk McKusick. The podcast is available at http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk018.mp3.

  • 17 February: In issue 17 of his bsdtalk series of podcasts, Will Backman interviews FreeBSD release engineer Scott Long about the upcoming FreeBSD 5.5 and 6.1 releases and related topics. The podcast is available at http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk017.mp3.

  • 13 February: New committer: Chuck Lever (src)

  • 13 February: The ``FreeBSD Kernel Internals: An Intensive Code Walkthrough'' course will be taught during the Spring of 2006. The class will be held at the historic Hillside Club at 2286 Cedar Strett, Berkeley, CA 94709 just three blocks north of the Berkeley campus once per week from 6:30PM to 9:45PM starting Wednesday February 22nd and finishing Tuesday June 13th. You can get more information or sign up for the class here.

  • 9 February: The first beta releases of FreeBSD 5.5 and FreeBSD 6.1 are now available. The respective BETA1 ISO images are available on most of the FreeBSD Mirror sites.

January 2006

Old announcements: 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996

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