The FreeBSD project has now officially released version 9.1 of the BSD Unix derived operating system. At the same time, the project's 2012 fund raising initiative blew past its $500,000 goal and is currently sitting at $684,905 raised; over $250,000 of that appears to have come from an anonymous donor.

FreeBSD 9.1 is the first point update of the FreeBSD 9.x branch; FreeBSD 9.0 was released in January 2012. The update is predominantly about improving the stability and performance of the operating system. It does, though, introduce a number of features such as a new Intel GPU driver with GEM/KMS memory management support, the netmap packet I/O framework, improvements from the Illumos project for ZFS and a disk and processor device emulation subsystem, CTL (CAM Target Layer).

Other additions include mounting support for devfs, nullfs, zfs and configuration file support in FreeBSD jails, extended locale support and kernel support for the AVX FPU extensions. KDE has been updated to version 4.8.4 and the LLVM compiler infrastructure and Clang compiler have been updated to version 3.1. A new C++ stack has been included wth C++11 support in libc++. Tmpfs has also been promoted and is no longer an experimental implementation.

Hardware drivers added include oce and sfxge (drivers for 10Gb Ethernet cards such as the Emulex OneConnect and cards based on the SolarFlare SFC9000 controller), a paravirtualised Xen backend driver and a Highpoint RocketRaid 27xx driver. For a detailed list of changes, updates and major bug fixes in 9.1, refer to the release notes and the errata which also lists security advisories addressed in the release.

FreeBSD 9.1 is available for 64-bit and 32-bit x86 systems, ia64, PowerPC and PowerPC64 systems, and 64-bit SPARC systems and can be downloaded from the project's servers and mirror sites or purchased on CD or DVD. An installation guide gives more details on what media is needed. FreeBSD is published under a 2-clause BSD licence.

(djwm)