From the
‘
the little beastie is out
‘
files:
FreeBSD 7.2 is now out and it includes a long list of updates and even a few new features. At the top of the list is improved memory management with superpages for memory allocation.
No superpages are not A ‘yellow pages’ type of printed directory, but rather an improved type of page file memory.
According to the FreeBSD 7.2 release notes, the FreeBSD virtual memory subsystem now supports fully transparent use of superpages for application memory.
“This change offers the benefit of large page sizes such as improved virtual memory efficiency and reduced TLB (translation lookaside buffer) misses without downsides like application changes and virtual memory inflexibility,” the release notes state.
From a security perspective the FreeBSD 7.2 release includes 8 issues (no that’s not many is it?) from the FreeBSD 7.1 release.
The desktop side has also been updated on Gnome to version 2.26 and on KDE up to 4.2.2, which is the first time FreeBSD has included KDE 4.x. Though FreeBSD 7.2 is just being release now though, PC-BSD 7.1 which is a desktop variant of FreeBSD has been out for several weeks and was already using early versions of FreeBSD 7.2 including KDE 4.2.2.
Overall FreeBSD 7.2 looks to be a decent incremental update as FreeBSD developers continue to gear up for FreeBSD 8.