FreeBSD support for AMD64 on the way

THE OTHER FREE operating system is making progress towards support for several 64bit platforms. FreeBSD 5.0 introduced SPARC64 and IA64 (Itanium) to its list of platforms and AMD64 is likely to be added in version 5.2.

Version 5.0 of FreeBSD added some seriously nice and definitely useful features. Background filesystem check (bgfsck), UFS2 and file system snapshots on the storage side of things make for a much more comfortable system. They should also reduce downtime, not that many FreeBSD admins know what downtime is.

FreeBSD is often cited as being a better choice for government funding of development work due to its far less onerous licensing. Basically, code from FreeBSD can be lifted by anyone who is interested in using it. Apple's Mac OSX is based on FreeBSD but heavily modified and Microsoft has been known to borrow a snippet or two.

This story was first spotted by AMDZone. µ