FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1 Available

The availability of FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1 was just announced. I am excited to see this release approaching. Here are a few excerpts from the release announcement thread that may be of interest.

  • Colin Percival: "The FreeBSD Security Team will support FreeBSD 5.x until at least the end
    of September 2007."

  • Colin Percival: "If I was deploying a new server today, I'd install FreeBSD 5.4. If I were planning on installing a new server next month, I'd install FreeBSD 6.0-BETA-whatever-number-we're-up-to-by-then."

  • Scott Long: "There will be a 5.5 release this fall and possibly a 5.6 a few months after that. Per the standard procedure, the security team will support the branch for 2 years after the final release. There will likely be other developers who have an interest in backporting changes to RELENG_5 for some time to come, just as has been done with RELENG_4. So the earliest that RELENG_5 will be de-supported is late 2007."

  • Scott Long: "Part of the purpose of moving quickly on to RELENG_6 is so that the migration work for users from 5.x to 6.x is very small. 6.x is really just an evolutionary step from 5.x, not the life-altering revolutionary step that 4.x->5.x was. It should be quite easy to deploy and maintain 5.x and 6.x machines side-by-side and migrate them as the need arises. We don't want people to be stranded on RELENG_5 like they were with RELENG_4. 6.x offers everything of 5.x, but with better performance and (hopefully) better stability. If you're thinking about evaluating 5.x, give 6.0 a try also."


The release schedule shows a 15 August release announcement, but I expect to see 6.0 RELEASE in mid-September. I am sure the FreeBSD release team will want 6.0 to be a solid product, and the todo list still contains multiple important outstanding issues.

Comments

Anonymous said…
hmmm. wonder why they had to go to 6 instead of going to 5.5.
Joao Barros said…
The same reason they had to go from 4 to 5: "radical" changes to the system require changes to the API/ABI and that breaks things. Because of that you have to bump versions.
That's why you have COMPAT5 in FreeBSD 6 ;)
Anonymous said…
I head the changees from 5 to 6 was as drastic as from 4 to 5.

I am particularly looking forward to the WPA wireless stuff. I have been wanting to build my own access point for a while and utlize PF but haven't had a way to do it really. Hopefully when 6 is released it will fully support 802.11x. Building a wireless router based on freeBSD with WPA and pf would be a cool project to undertake. besides...monowall is built off of FreeBSD, including WPA access there would just add more features to an already great product.

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