FreeBSD 7.2 released for download

The FreeBSD Team announced the availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.1 and introduces some new features.

What is FreeBSD?

FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4.4BSD operating systems. It runs on Intel x86 family IBM PC compatible computers, Sun UltraSPARC, IA-64, AMD64, PowerPC, ARM and NEC PC-9801 architectures along with Microsoft's Xbox. Support for other architectures is in varying stages of development. The DEC Alpha architecture was previously supported between releases 4.0 and 7.0, with the code being removed for FreeBSD 7.0. FreeBSD currently has more than 200 active developers and thousands of contributors.

FreeBSD has been characterized as "the unknown giant among free operating systems." It is not a clone of UNIX, but works like UNIX, with UNIX-compliant internals and system APIs. FreeBSD is generally regarded as reliable and robust.

FreeBSD is developed as a complete operating system. The kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source code revision tracking tree, whereas with Linux distributions, the kernel, userland utilities and applications are developed separately, then packaged together in various ways by others.

Processor based Improvements:

• 64-Bit and 32-Bit Processors
  
  The FreeBSD virtual memory subsystem now supports fully transparent use of superpages for application memory; application memory pages are dynamically promoted to or demoted from superpages without any modification to application code. This change offers the benefit of large page sizes such as improved virtual memory efficiency and reduced TLB known as translation lookaside buffer misses without downsides like application changes and virtual memory inflexibility. This is disabled by default and can be enabled by setting a loader tunable vm.pmap.pg_ps_enabled to 1.
  
  
• 64-Bit Processors
  
  The FreeBSD kernel virtual address space has been increased to 6GB. This allows subsystems to use larger virtual memory space than before. For example, zfs adaptive replacement cache (ARC) requires large kernel memory space to cache file system data, so it benefits from the increased address space. Note that the ceiling on the kernel map size is now 60% of the size rather than an absolute quantity.

Other Features :

• The FreeBSD now supports Ultra SPARC III processor which is from Cheetah processor family.
  
• The boot BTX loader has been improved. This fixes several boot issues on recent machines reported for 7.1-RELEASE and before.
  
• A bug in the ciss driver which caused low “max device openings” count and led to poor performance has been fixed.
  
• The sdhci driver has been added. This supports PCI devices with class 8 and subclass 5 according to the SD Host Controller Specification.
  
• Various network interface drivers have been improved, including ae, ath_hal, axe, bce, cxgb, fxp, igb, jme, msk, mxge, nfe, re, rl, sis, and txp.
  
• The btpand daemon from NetBSD has been added. This daemon provides support for Bluetooth Network Access Point [NAP], Group Ad-hoc Network [GN] and Personal Area Network User [PANU] profiles.
  
• The jail subsystem has been updated
  
• The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment [x11/gnome2] has been updated from 2.22 to 2.26.
  
• The supported version of the KDE desktop environment has been updated from KDE 3.5.10 to KDE 4.2.2.

Downloads :

Download - 32-Bit DVD

Download - 64-Bit DVD


Download - PowerPC CD-1
Download - PowerPC CD-2
Download - PowerPC CD-3

Download - 64-Bit Sparc