The Grinch That Delayed FreeBSD 9.1

It's currently unknown when FreeBSD 9.1 will be officially released.

Originally the plan for FreeBSD 9.1 was to release it in mid-September, but the first release candidate was one month late along with the RC2 and RC3 releases. The plan was then updated to release FreeBSD 9.1 at the end of October, but that too passed. The latest schedule set the RELEASE announcement as going out on 12 November, but that clearly didn't work either.

It's been more than one month since the last test release (FreeBSD 9.1-RC3) and there's still no sign of an imminent release. Asked on the mailing list this weekend was Will we get a RELEASE-9.1 for Christmas? There's FreeBSD stakeholders delaying new server rollouts until the FreeBSD 9.1 availability, but there's been no clear communication from FreeBSD developers when the release will happen.

Throwing an additional wrench into things was the recent penetration of the FreeBSD.org servers. In response to the question about the FreeBSD 9.1 release date, FreeBSD's Adrian Chadd wrote, "It's still progressing, albeit slowly. There's been a lot of security checking going on in the background as part of this task and that takes time."

Chris Petrik had a response of simply "It will be released when it is ready."

So really right now it's quite up in the air when FreeBSD 9.1 will actually ship, it might be in time for Christmas or maybe not. Among the features to look forward to with FreeBSD 9.1 when it's actually available include improved networking/802.11n support, beadm for ZFS file-system boot environments, driver updates, and of much interest is that there's finally the Intel DRM/KMS graphics driver stack that's been ported to mainline FreeBSD.

While not coming until at least sometime much later into next year, there's also a lot riding on the FreeBSD 10 release.