Download FreeBSD 8.0

Members of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team released version 8.0 of FreeBSD last Friday. FreeBSD was created in 1993 and is developed as an operating system in its entirety. This is in contrast to Linux, for example, where the kernel is maintained by one group of developers and certain applications by others. Because of this, FreeBSD is generally considered more stable and robust than other operating systems. Downloads for the different processor architectures are available via ftp and bittorrent. Below are the release notes of version 8.0, detailing the most important changes:

FreeBSD 8.0 RELEASE Announcement

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE. This release starts off the new 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.X and introduces many new features. Some of the highlights:

• Xen Dom-U, VirtualBox guest and host, hierarchical jails.
• NFSv3 GSSAPI support, experimental NFSv4 client and server.
• 802.11s D3.03 wireless mesh networking and Virtual Access Point support.
• ZFS is no longer in experimental status.
• Ground-up rewrite of USB, including USB target support.
• Continued SMP scalability improvements in many areas, especially VFS.
• Revised network link layer subsystem.
• Experimental MIPS architecture support.

the press release contains more information on this release.

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list available at:

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities please see: