There’s no official announcement, but just over 2 years after FreeBSD 8.0 BETA1 became available, the FreeBSD Project is uploading version 9 BETA1..
According to the FreeBSD release page, BETA1 was scheduled for 20 July, so a delay of just over a week is a great result. Hopefully the final release hits the streets in sometime in September.
Some of the news features that can be found in FreeBSD 9 are:
- SSD TRIM support
- 802.11n high throughput support
- ATA/CAM improvements
- PCI hot-plug support
- S4 hibernation support
- Xen Dom0 support
- Linux 64-bit binary support in FreeBSD/amd64
- Better EFI booting support
- Better support for LLVM (the Low-Level Virtual Machine)
- user-land D-Trace support,
- Improved Oracle VM VirtualBox support
- faster reboot
For more (technical) features check out Ivan Voras’ What’s cooking for FreeBSD 9 page or the FreeBSD 9 wiki.
You can download the ISO images from the links below.
Please note, since there’s no official announcement, these images may contain show stoppers and/or may be removed without any notice.