FreeBSD 6.0 Beta 1 Released

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced on Friday availability of the first beta release of FreeBSD 6.0. The open source UNIX-based operating system is popular for server environments, and version 6.0 is expected to bring incremental improvements over the FreeBSD 5 branch, rather than dramatic changes.

"These changes include streamlining direct device access in the kernel, providing a multi-threaded SMP-safe UFS/VFS filesystem layer, implementing WPA and Host-AP 802.11 features," FreeBSD developer Scott Long said in the announcement. "32bit application support for AMD64 is also greatly improved, as is compatiblity with certain Athlon64 motherboards." FreeBSD 6.0 is also expected to bring the first support for Apple Mac systems using a G3 or G4 processor.