FreeBSD 9 release updates ZFS support

OPEN SOURCE OPERATING SYSTEM FreeBSD has released FreeBSD 9.0, almost a year after its previous release, updating ZFS to pool version 28.

FreeBSD 9 is the first major release of FreeBSD in almost 12 months and has a new installer as well as updates to ZFS and NFS. FreeBSD has long been a staple in servers, and while its mantle of most popular BSD-based operating system has been taken over by Apple's Mac OS X, the dedicated FreeBSD community continues to churn out releases.

Unlike with newer Linux distributions, FreeBSD's installer has changed little in the past decade and the latest version of bsdinstall could still prove a bit too basic for those used to Ubuntu or Linux Mint. While the installer might not have changed much, users now have the capability to install FreeBSD 9.0 on Sony's Playstation 3.

The most important changes in FreeBSD 9 are under the hood with one of the operating system's headline features, ZFS, being updated to version 28. Also updated are the ATA/SATA AHCI drivers and the first production version of FreeBSD's Highly Available Storage framework.

FreeBSD is known for its TCP stack implementation and FreeBSD 9 supports pluggable congestion control with five algorithms available. The NFS subsystem has been updated to support NFSv4, with high performance SSH also making its debut.

Although FreeBSD's popularity has waned as Linux distributions have matured to gain enterprise server deployments, it still retains a dedicated following and supports a wide range of big tin server processor architectures including i386, x64, Powerpc and Sparc. µ