Download FreeBSD 8.2

Members of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team released version 8.2 of FreeBSD on Thursday. FreeBSD was created in 1993 and is developed as a whole, unlike, say, Linux, whose kernel is maintained by one group of developers and certain applications by others. Because of this, FreeBSD is generally considered more stable and robust than several other operating systems. Downloads for the different processor architectures are available via ftp and bittorrent. Below are the release notes of version 8.2, detailing the most important changes:

FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE Announcement

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

• Xen HVM support in FreeBSD/amd64 and Xen PV support in FreeBSD/i386 improved
• ZFS on-disk format updated to version 15
• aesni(4) driver for Intel AESNI crypto instruction set
• BIND and OpenSSL updates
• Gnome updated to 2.32.1
• KDE updated to 4.5.5
• many misc. improvements and bug fixes

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list available at:

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities please see: