The FreeBSD devs are slowly getting closer to 10.1

Oct 27, 2014 13:03 GMT  ·  By

The FreeBSD 10.1 distribution, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, now has a new Release Candidate out and it looks like the developers are homing in the final version.

The previous RC in the series had a very short list of changes and just a couple of regressions, which indicated that we might get a stable version soon. It looks like that wasn't the case after all and that we still have to be patient and gaze with great interest at what the devs are doing.

FreeBSD 10.0 was a big step forward for this distribution and a natural evolution from the 9.x branch. People tend to forget that open source is not the same thing with Linux and there are other distros out there that might be using a completely different base, like BSD for example. The first point release for FreeBSD 10.x is also an important step for the devs because it gathers a huge number of changes that will make users’ lives much easier.

FreeBSD 10.1 RC3 fixes a ton of stuff

We were expecting to see fewer modifications and improvements with each new version, given the advanced stage of the development cycle. It was also to be expected that RC3 would be the final iteration, but there is no mention in the announcement and it's impossible to say if this is the last one.

"Important note to those upgrading from previous -RC or -BETA builds: An API incompatibility was discovered between 10.0-RELEASE and 10.1-RC2 which was reverted prior to 10.1-RC3 builds, and the libopie.so shared library version was changed from '8' back to '7' in the releng/10.1 branch."

"A regression has been discovered that affects multi-disk (mirror, raidz-1, raidz-2, etc.) installations that may cause a kernel panic on boot. If using a multi-disk ZFS setup, adding 'options KSTACK_PAGES=4' to the kernel configuration is observed to resolve the problem," say the devs.

Basically, it's not recommended to upgrade your system if you have a multi-disk ZFS setup in place. Also, the makers of FreeBSD have corrected a number of memory leaks, various small problems, and they have even updated the vt driver. The official changelog comes with a complete list of instructions and notes.

You can download FreeBSD 10.1 RC3 right now from Softpedia and give it a go. This is not a Live CD, so if you want to test it properly, you will have to install it.