FreeBSD Foundation Announces FreeBSD 5.4
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 www.FreeBSD.org.
Source: 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 Media
Services, +1-360-658-5676, for The FreeBSD Project;
or Matt Olander of FreeBSD
Marketing Team, +1-408-943-4100, ext. 113
FreeBSD Project Web site: http://www.freebsd.org
FreeBSD Fondation Web Site: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org