FreeBSD 6.1 Released

The long awaited FreeBSD 6.1 has started appearing today on the mirrors worldwide, just as I am writing this.

When everyone was waiting for FreeBSD 6.0, wondering what performance improvements it will bring, it was considered to be the release that brought the highest number of changes and new features.

While 6.0 was a generally stable and a very well performing system, there were some bugs and it left room for further improvement.

After all, the same thing goes for the 5.0 release, it's not as optimized, nor as tuned as the more recent 5.x versions, like 5.3 or 5.4.

Ever since the releases of 5.0 and 6.0 were released, some said that they didn't perform as well as the 4.x series, which had better network performance. Therefore, this problem had to be solved. 6.1 fixes this issue for the 6.x series, while the 5.x series will be fixed in the 5.5 release.

FreeBSD 6.1 brings better performance, broader hardware support, better stability, workarounds for certain hardware bugs and various userland changes. All in all, this is a tuned 6.0 with performance and stability improvements, bug fixes, added hardware support and a few minor new features.

The release of FreeBSD 6.1 hasn't been officially announced yet, it just started hitting the mirrors today. Is FreeBSD 6.1 the best release ever? Perhaps the fastest? What about stability? Well, you can easily find out, just install it and see how well it works for you and how well it suits your requirements.

What is FreeBSD?

As stated on the home page, "FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon 64, and EM64T), Alpha/AXP, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley."

You can download the new version of FreeBSD from Softpedia.