FreeBSD 7.2 Released

An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: Support for fully transparent use of superpages for application memory; Support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for jails; csup(1) now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository; Gnome updated to 2.26, KDE updated to 4.2.2; Sparc64 now supports UltraSparc-III processors. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list." Adds another anonymous reader, "You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors or via BitTorrent. There is also a quick review of the new features and upgrade instructions."

Comments

Re:Includes ZFS and DTrace production ready !

[TheRaven64]

The problem with ZFS on OpenSolaris i386 is that ZFS is very heavy on 64-bit arithmetic. The only way of doing this on x86 is to store the 64-bit value across two registers, meaning that each calculation uses 4 registers in total, dramatically increasing register churn. This makes performance suck.

The problem on FreeBSD is that the adaptive replacement cache runs out of memory and the kernel panics. This is a much, much more serious problem. I'll take slow-but-working over crashes-and-loses-data any day.

Still, I'm looking forward to 8 RELEASE if it includes ZFS v13 and the improvements to the sound subsystem (per-vchan volume, faster mixing, and so on).