The FreeBSD Release Team has announced the availability of version 8.3 of its open source FreeBSD operating system. The fourth stable 8.x branch release offers a choice of either GNOME 2.32.1 or KDE SC 4.7.4 as the distribution's desktop environment, and includes various hardware support and networking changes.

FreeBSD's usb(4) subsystem now includes support for the USB packet filter, which allows it to capture packets that pass through each USB host controller. Support for the mod_cc pluggable congestion control framework has been added to the TCP/IP stack. Other changes include the addition of the graid control utility for software RAID devices, and write cache control support in the ATA Direct Access (ADA) device driver. The Storage Pool Allocator (SPA), also known as zpool, in the ZFS subsystem has been updated to version 28.

A full list of changes and new features can be found in the official release announcement and in the release notes. Version 8.3 of FreeBSD is available to download for the amd64, i386, pc98 and sparc64 architectures, and an installation guide is provided. Source code for FreeBSD is made available under the two-clause BSD license.

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