FreeBSD 8.1 RC1 released

One week later than originally scheduled, the FreeBSD development team have issued a first release candidate (RC1) for version 8.1 of their popular free Unix derivative. A second release candidate was expected to arrive on the 25th of June, followed by the final release build on the 9th of July, however, it's likely the RC1 delay will push both dates back by approximately one week.

FreeBSD 8.1 will be the first stable major point update to version 8.0 of FreeBSD from November of last year. FreeBSD 8.0 featured improvements to Solaris ZFS support and added support for superpages, a new USB stack, a rewritten NFS client/server with NFSv4 and multicast updates including Internet Group Management Protocol version 3 (IGMPv3). As with all development releases, use of FreeBSD 8.1 in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the release may be found in the official release announcement and on the FreeBSD 8.1 Release Engineering page. FreeBSD 8.1 RC1 is available to download from one of the project's FTP mirrors.

See also:

• EuroBSDCon 2010: Call for Papers, a report from The H.
• FreeBSD 7.3 released, a report from The H.
• Health Check: FreeBSD, a feature from The H.

(crve)