Download FreeBSD 8.3

Members of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team released version 8.3 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 8.3, detailing the most important changes:

FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE Announcement

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.2 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

• usb(4) now supports the USB packet filter
• TCP/IP stack now supports the mod_cc(9) pluggable congestion control framework
• graid(8) GEOM class added to support various BIOS-based software RAID controllers (replacement for ataraid(4))
• ZFS subsystem updated to SPA version 28
• Gnome version 2.32.1, KDE version 4.7.4

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: