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FreeBSD Unveils Latest FreeBSD Operating System Release

Posted on: Friday, 13 May 2005, 18:00 CDT

BOULDER, Colo., May 13 /PRNewswire/ -- This week, the FreeBSD Project released version 5.4 of the FreeBSD operating system. This new release offers new features, new tools, and numerous improvements in security, hardware and networking support for the UNIX-like operating system.

"Commonly known as an ideal web server platform, FreeBSD is also 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.

The FreeBSD release supports various hardware architectures including HP/Compaq Alpha systems, AMD's AMD64, Intel EM64T, Intel IA-64 (Itanium), NEC PC-98x1, UltraSPARC, and standard Intel x86 compatible hardware.

"This release builds on the success of the FreeBSD 5 series and includes several new features including significantly improved support for systems with more than 4GB of RAM for both 32-bit and 64-bit Intel and AMD systems," said Scott Long, member of the FreeBSD Release Engineering team.

"And many stability and performance improvements were made to the network stack, drivers, and services, the power management subsystem, and the Linux emulation subsystem," said Long.

New hardware supported by this release includes GPIB-PCIIA IEEE-488 cards, USB Communication Device Class (CDC) ethernet devices, Areca SATA II RAID controllers, and the HighPoint's RocketRAID 182x series ATA RAID controller.

The release also provides new support for natively running many Windows 64-bit NDIS (network) drivers on the AMD64 platform and improved performance and support for the LSI MegaRAID and Adaptec ServeRAID adapters.

A CPU frequency control framework has been added for adjusting Intel SpeedStep for ICH, Intel Enhanced SpeedStep, and ACPI CPU performance states.

FreeBSD 5.4 enhances its high availability and load balancing support by adding Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP) for allowing multiple hosts to share IP addresses.

And the IPv4 IPsec implementation now supports the TCP-MD5 extension for enhanced security.

New tools included with the base install of FreeBSD are netcat, for various manual TCP and UDP tasks, and tcpdrop, for dropping TCP sessions.

The FreeBSD release also includes various software updates including BIND, Heimdal Kerberos, OpenSSL, and Sendmail. And the third-party software packages collection has numerous updates including to KDE, GNOME, and the X.org X Window System.

"FreeBSD continues to set the standards for reliability and general usability for a wide variety of corporate, academic, and personal computing needs," said Ken Smith, member of the FreeBSD Release Engineering team.

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

About The FreeBSD Project

The FreeBSD Project provides an up-to-date and scalable modern operating system that offers high-performance, security, and advanced networking for personal workstations, Internet servers, routers, and firewalls. The FreeBSD packages collection includes popular software like Apache Web Server, Gnome, KDE, X.org X11 Window System, Python, Mozilla, and over 12,000 software suites. FreeBSD can be found on the Internet at http://www.freebsd.org/.

The FreeBSD Project

CONTACT: FreeBSD Marketing Team, press@FreeBSD.org; or Justin Gibbs,Secretary/Treasurer of The FreeBSD Foundation, +1-720-839-4605; or Scott Long,FreeBSD Release Engineer, +1-303-775-3807; or Jeremy C. Reed of Reed MediaServices, +1-360-658-5676, for The FreeBSD Project; or Matt Olander of FreeBSDMarketing Team, +1-408-943-4100, ext. 113

Web site: http://www.freebsd.org/

Source: PRNewswire

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