FreeBSD 11 Alpha 1 — New Features Coming To This Open Source OS

Short Bytes: FreeBSD foundation has announced the code freeze for the FreeBSD 11 release, marking the start of the Alpha 1 release. This release brings many features, especially for the system administrators and super users.

For those unfamiliar with FreeBSD, it is considered one of the few operating systems left to be true UNIX. It is a direct descendant of the BELL/AT&T labs UNIX. Much of the software available for Linux is also available for FreeBSD as well, including Gnome and KDE desktop environments and much more user and server software. Despite the amount of software available, it is often thought of as an obscure system with a rather small software library. This is simply

This belief is simply untrue, and is less and less true every day due to FreeBSD being able to emulate many Linux system calls. This means much software developed specifically for Linux can be run on FreeBSD as well.

Other operating systems in the same family are Mac OS X, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Orbis OS which is the operating system that runs on PlayStation 4 Gaming consoles.

FreeBSD is a longstanding landmark in the open source community, and while it doesn’t have as large a user-base as Linux, what it lacks in popularity it surely makes up for in stability, security, and features.

FreeBSD is used in cutting-edge enterprises and is used for the underlying infrastructure of many well-known products like Netflix, WhatsApp, and even as the base for network appliances made by Juniper as well as other companies.

Among the biggest changes to come when FreeBSD 11 arrives in September are updates to:

The network stack
Improvements for ARM support
Several updates to the bhyve hypervisor
Many security updates
Storage subsystem updates and an upgraded version of OpenZFS

Beyond the mentioned changes, there is a very large and much more detailed list available here.

Are any fossBytes readers FreeBSD users? If so, let us know below in the comments what you think. If not, let us know why not or if you plan on trying it out sometime soon.

Also Read: Microsoft Creates Its Own Distribution Of FreeBSD Operating System

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