Sexy Jihad

John Baldwin: Support for WPA security for 802.11. The tty subsystem has been reworked in preparation for adding fine-graind locking in the future. FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/amd64 now use the timer in the local APIC to drive the various kernel clocks. Support for several different CPU frequency drivers such as SpeedStep and PowerNow. Support for hardware performance monitoring counters on i386, amd64 and ia64. The if_bridge(4) driver from NetBSD has been merged in as well. There are lots of other things that I’m sure I’m missing, but more details can be found at http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes.html in the release notes documents for FreeBSD-Current.

Robert N M Watson: You’ll also find features like read-only support for reiserfs, and substantial performance optimization and SMP cleanup from our first design for fine-grained SMP in 5.x, compiler suite upgrades, significant upgrades to our 802.11 code to support features like WPA and authentication/crypto plug-in frameworks, and complete integration of IPv6 into the ipfw2 firewall (previously IPv6 was supported separately). There’s also a substantial re-write of the libthr threading library by David Xu, which offers significant performance enhancements for 1:1 threading users.

Scott Long: The APIC change for i386 and amd64 that John mentioned is actualy a very important feature. Many motherboards, especially newer Athlon64 desktop boards, cannot even boot FreeBSD 4.x or 5.x, but work very well under 6.0 with these changes.

PowerPC support is something that I consider FreeBSD 6.0’s best kept secret. Installing FreeBSD/ppc on a Mac is a little cumbersome (though not much different from NetBSD or Linux), but once installed it works very well and runs X Windows and most apps. I run it on my MacMini, and there is effort underway to provideWe are looking at possible providing install ISOs for it for 6.0.