The FreeBSD project has released a new Developer Preview of 5.0. New stuff since the previous DP includes, "The GEOM disk geometry module and the GBDE on-disk encryption system. A compiler toolchain based on GCC 3.2. A new extensible Mandatory Access Control framework, the TrustedBSD MAC Framework. The new UFS2 on-disk format, with support for larger filesystems and extended file attributes. Support for Firewire devices. Experimental support for the RAIDframe software RAID disk driver.".
Compared to FreeBSD 4.7, version 5.0 will also include a rewritten thread system, much better SMP support and many other goodies. They have taken Perl out of the base system; putting them with NetBSD and MS-Windows as one of few systems not having Perl in the default install. :-) It's really not a bad thing though. With FreeBSD 4.x it's generally a huge pain to upgrade the system Perl; hopefully it will work out better the new way (installable via the ports system).
Eventhough I only have one and a half FreeBSD box left I manage, it is quite exciting. Will it be too little too late? Linux is moving much faster. Spinning its wheels more than FreeBSD, but still moving faster in the end. Will Apples involvement with BSD be intimate enough that FreeBSD will get a boost from it?
