June 9, 2003

BOULDER, Colo., June 9 /PRNewswire/ — The FreeBSD Foundation announced today the availability of FreeBSD 5.1, the latest version of the FreeBSD Project’s powerful operating system. This release is the product of three years of development on FreeBSD version 5 and includes many improved and widely-sought features:

  • Experimental threading libraries provide 1:1 and M:N kernel support for multithreaded applications, accelerating performance and allowing applications to take full advantage of multiple CPUs.
  • Expanded hardware support includes USB 2.0, IBM/Adaptec ServeRAID controllers, USB Ethernet adapters, and Promise and Intel Serial ATA controllers.
  • Enhanced “jail” management, allowing one server to provide many different “virtual machines” with reduced administrator workload.
  • Support for Physical Address Extensions, allowing the use of up to 64GB of RAM on supported x86 platforms.
  • Experimental support for AMD’s Opteron 64-bit platform.

Building on the success of FreeBSD 5.0, FreeBSD 5.1 provides additional infrastructure improvements set out for the 5.x series. FreeBSD 5.1 ships with the latest applications and tools, and is ready for immediate deployment as a desktop or server system for those users who are interested in the latest FreeBSD technology. For users tracking the mature 4.x release branch, FreeBSD 4.8 and the forthcoming FreeBSD 4.9 will continue to provide the absolute highest stability and performance.

Obtaining FreeBSD

FreeBSD is distributed under the Berkeley Software Distribtuion License and is available for no cost on the Internet from the FreeBSD Project page at http://www.FreeBSD.org/. It is also available as a shrink-wrap product through many retail vendors listed at http://www.FreeBSD.org/vendors.html.

About the FreeBSD Project

The FreeBSD Project provides a full 4.4BSD-Lite2 based operating system for the x86, Itanium, Alpha and UltraSPARC platforms. The FreeBSD Project includes several thousand developers from dozens of countries around the world who funnel their work through a team of several hundred core developers. For more information, please visit FreeBSD on the Web at http://www.FreeBSD.org/.