FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a Unix-like free software operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through 386BSD and 4.4BSD. more...

It runs on processors compatible with the Intel x86 family, as well as on the DEC Alpha, the UltraSPARC processors by Sun Microsystems, the Itanium (IA-64), AMD64 and PowerPC processors. It also runs on the PC-98 architecture. Support for the ARM and MIPS architectures are in development.

FreeBSD is developed together as an entire operating system. The kernel, all of the expected userland utilities such as the shell and the device drivers are held in the same source code revision tracking tree (CVS). This is in contrast to Linux, a similar and more well known free Unix-clone, which is developed as a kernel by one group, userland utilities by others such as the GNU project, and put together with applications into distributions that package all the parts together by others. As an operating system, FreeBSD is generally regarded as quite reliable and robust, and of the operating systems that accurately report uptime remotely , FreeBSD is the most common free operating system listed in Netcraft's list of the 50 web servers with longest uptime. A long uptime also indicates that no kernel updates have been deemed necessary, as installing a new kernel requires a reboot and resets the uptime counter of the system.

History and development

Initial development of FreeBSD was started in 1993, and took its sources from 386BSD. However, due to concerns about the legality of all the sources used in 386BSD, FreeBSD re-engineered much of the system with the FreeBSD 2.0 release in January of 1995 using the 4.4BSD-Lite release from the University of California, Berkeley. The FreeBSD Handbook includes more historical information about the genesis of FreeBSD.

Initially FreeBSD employed the BSD Daemon as its logo, but in 2005 a competition for a new logo was arranged. On October 8, 2005, the competition finished leaving the design by Anton K. Gural as the new FreeBSD logo. As always, the BSD Daemon is the FreeBSD Project mascot.

FreeBSD 5 development and changes

The last FreeBSD release before 6.x series is 5.4 (released on May 2005). FreeBSD developers maintain (at least) two branches of simultaneous development: a -STABLE branch of FreeBSD, from which releases are cut about once every 4-6 months. The latest 4-STABLE release of FreeBSD is 4.11, this is the last of 4-STABLE releases. The first 5-STABLE release was 5.3. The last 5-STABLE release will be 5.5. The first 6-STABLE release was 6.0. The development branch, -CURRENT, contains aggressive new kernel and userspace features. If a feature gets stable and mature it is eventually backported ("MFC" - Merge from CURRENT in the FreeBSD developer slang) to the STABLE branch. FreeBSD's development model is described in-depth in an article by Niklas Saers.

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