FreeBSD 9.1 Has Been Officially Released

The FreeBSD Foundation, the maker of the FreeBSD open source operating system, proudly announced on the last day of 2012 that the FreeBSD 9.1 release is now officially available.

Actually, the FreeBSD 9.1 operating system was available for download (without any official release) on the FTP servers of the FreeBSD Foundation since last week.

“The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the stable/9 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 9.0 and introduces some new features,” was stated in the official release announcement.

Highlights of FreeBSD 9.1:

· Added a new Intel GPU driver with support for KMS/GEM;
· Added netmap(4) fast userspace packet I/O framework;
· Improved the ZFS filesystem with patches from the illumos project;
· Added CAM Target Layer, a CPU and HDD device emulation subsystem;
· Added a new C++11 stack, including LLVM libcxxrt and libc++;
· Support for jail ZFS, devfs, and nullfs configuration and mounting;
· Support for POSIX2008 extended locale, including compatibility with Darwin extensions;
· Added oce(4) driver for the Emulex OneConnect 10Gbit Ethernet card;
· Added sfxge(4) driver for 10Gb Ethernet adapters, which are based on the Solarflare SFC9000 controller;
· Improved the Xen Paravirtualized Backend Ethernet Driver (netback);
· Added hpt27xx(4) driver for HighPoint RocketRAID 27xx-based SAS 6Gb/s HBA;
· Improved the GEOM multipath class;
· The GEOM raid class is now enabled by default and supports software RAID by deprecated ataraid(8);
· Added support for the AVX FPU extension in kernel;
· Better support for IPv6 hardware offload.

FreeBSD 9 – Image courtesy of DistroWatch

For detailed information about the FreeBSD 9.1 operating system, you can view the official release notes.

FreeBSD 9.1 is distributed as bootable ISO images, supporting 32-bit, 64-bit, PowerPC64 and SPARC64 architectures, as well as network-based installation images. It will be supported with security updates and patches for two years, until December 31, 2014.

Download FreeBSD 9.1 right now from Softpedia.