FreeBSD 9 BETA1 available for testing

There’s no official announcement, but just over 2 years after FreeBSD 8.0 BETA1 became available, the FreeBSD Project is uploading version 9 BETA1..

According to the FreeBSD release page, BETA1 was scheduled for 20 July, so a delay of just over a week is a great result. Hopefully the final release hits the streets in sometime in  September.

Some of the news features that can be found in FreeBSD 9 are:

• SSD TRIM support
• 802.11n high throughput support
• ATA/CAM improvements
• PCI hot-plug support
• S4 hibernation support
• Xen Dom0 support
• Linux 64-bit binary support in FreeBSD/amd64
• Better EFI booting support
• Better support for LLVM (the Low-Level Virtual Machine)
• user-land D-Trace support,
• Improved Oracle VM VirtualBox support
• faster reboot

For more (technical) features check out Ivan Voras’ What’s cooking for FreeBSD 9 page or the FreeBSD 9 wiki.

You can download the ISO images from the links below.

• FreeBSD 9 BETA1 – i386
• FreeBSD 9 BETA1 – AMD64

Please note, since there’s no official announcement, these images may contain show stoppers and/or may be removed without any notice.