OSS Watch team blog

FreeBSD has released version 6.2.

Kernel updates include the obligatory bug fixes as well as improved networking and file systems. Userland updates include new command line options to a striking number of everyday commands, mainly to improve their coverage of new functionality or produce cleaner output.

For those not already familiar with FreeBSD, Wikipedia says:

FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4.4BSD operating systems. It runs on Intel x86 family (IA-32) PC compatible systems (including the Microsoft Xbox), and also DEC Alpha, Sun UltraSPARC, IA-64, AMD64, PowerPC and NEC PC-98 architectures. Support for the ARM and MIPS architectures are under development.

FreeBSD is developed as a complete operating system. The kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source code revision tracking tree (CVS). This is in contrast to Linux, a similar but better-known operating system, in which the kernel is developed by one set of developers; userland utilities and applications by others, such as the GNU project; and all are packaged together by other groups and published as Linux distributions.

As an operating system, FreeBSD is generally regarded as quite reliable and robust, and of the operating systems that accurately report uptime remotely, FreeBSD is the most common free operating system listed in Netcraft’s list of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime (uptime on some operating systems such as some versions of Linux can’t be calculated). A long uptime also indicates that no kernel updates have been deemed necessary, as installing a new kernel requires a reboot and resets the uptime counter of the system.