FreeBSD 7.0 Developments

I am happy to announce that progress is being made towards the release of FreeBSD 7.0. This announcement says the release cycles for FreeBSD 7.0 and 6.3 have begun. The first 7.0-BETA1 .iso's you might want to test on a fresh system have been published. The announcement says "Instructions on using FreeBSD Update to perform a binary upgrade from FreeBSD 6.x to 7.0-BETA1 will be provided via the freebsd-stable list when available."

The FreeBSD 7.0 release schedule is available, and it shows FreeBSD 7.0 is scheduled for publication on 17 Dec 07. I would love to see this happen, but it's likely to take place about a month later. However, given the time between now and December, it's possible 7.0 will arrive by the end of the year. It looks like the todo list is rather small.

While researching this story I found Bruce Mah's FreeBSD Release Documentation Snapshot Page. A large amount of documentation for each release is published there.

When available I will probably use 7.0 in production. I had no problem with 6.0 in production. This is a departure from the experience of 5.0 and 5.1. I didn't transition from the 4.x line in production until 5.2.1 was released.