FInally, FreeBSD 8.0 Released

The much-anticipated FreeBSD 8.0 release is finally available, albeit it's arriving more than a month late. FreeBSD 8.0 supports Clang/LLVM (Edit: though right now GCC remains the default compiler), improvements to the Jails subsystem, a new USB stack, the ULE 3.0 scheduler that's optimized for SMP environments, Sun's D-Trace support for kernel traces, NFSv4 support, network improvements, improved ZFS file-system support, and much more.

FreeBSD 8.0 is available from their (FTP server), while we still have been waiting on an official release announcement. Details on some of the FreeBSD 8.0 features can be found from this web-page. Information on the FreeBSD 8.0 release process can be found on the FreeBSD Wiki.

We delivered some early FreeBSD 8.0 benchmarks back in September, but we have been anxious for this final release to deliver a fresh round of complete benchmarks from an official release, which can now be carried out and published soon. FreeBSD 8.0 should work with version 2.2 "Bardu" of the Phoronix Test Suite while the next release, 2.4 "Lenvik", will further improve the experience.

FreeBSD 8.0 will also allow NVIDIA to finally release a 64-bit *BSD display driver thanks to the revised mmap() extensions support.