The FreeBSD project has released a new version of its Unix-like operating system. FreeBSD 5.4 offers new features, new tools, and numerous improvements in security, hardware, and networking support, the project says. It targets network appliances and embedded systems, as well as high-performance computing applications.

Traditionally, NetBSD has been the BSD flavor of choice for embedded developers, since it is the most portable. FreeBSD is more widely used on the desktop and in servers, however, and it includes more — and more up-to-date — applications. FreeBSD runs on 64-bit HP/Compaq Alpha, AMD64, Intel EM64T and IA-64 (Itanium), UltraSPARC, standard PC hardware, and NEC's PC-98×1 line of processors for Japanese-language PCs.

New features include:

• Support for a variety of new hardware, including GPIB-PCIIA IEEE-488 cards, USB CDC (communication device class) ethernet devices, and several RAID controllers
• Support for natively running many Windows 64-bit NDIS (network) drivers on AMD64
• A new CPU frequency control framework
• Support for CARP (common address redundancy protocol) for high availability and load-balancing applications
• Support for TCP-MD5 in the IPSec implementation
• Updated applications, including BIND, Heimdal Kerbos, OpenSSL, and Sendmail, and new software from the KDE, GNOME, and X.org projects
• Improved support for systems with more than 4GB of RAM
• Better performance and stability in the Linux emulation subsystem

“FreeBSD is well-suited for high-performance computing applications, network appliances, and embedded systems — especially due to its developer-friendly Berkeley license,” said Matt Olander, Offmyserver.com engineer.

Availability

The FreeBSD 5.4 release is available via online stores and can be downloaded for free via the FreeBSD website.

 
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