Download FreeBSD 9.0

The members of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team have finally released version 9.0 of FreeBSD. 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 you will find the release notes of version 9.0, with the most important changes.

FreeBSD 9.0 RELEASE Announcement

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the stable/9 branch, which improves on stable/8 and adds many new features. Some of the highlights:

• A new installer, bsdinstall(8) has been added and is the installer used by the ISO images provided as part of this release
• The Fast Filesystem now supports softupdates journaling
• ZFS updated to version 28
• Updated ATA/SATA drivers support AHCI, moved into updated CAM framework
• Highly Available Storage (HAST) framework
• Kernel support for Capsicum Capability Mode, an experimental set of features for sandboxing support
• User-level DTrace
• The TCP/IP stack now supports pluggable congestion control framework and five congestion control algorithm implementations available
• NFS subsystem updated, new implementation supports NFSv4 in addition to NFSv3 and NFSv2
• High Performance SSH (HPN-SSH)
• Flattened device tree (FDT), simplifying FreeBSD configuration for embedded platforms
• The powerpc architecture now supports Sony Playstation 3
• The LLVM compiler infrastructure and clang have been imported
• Gnome version 2.32.1, KDE version 4.7.3

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: