Like many software projects, the FreeBSD open source Unix effort is marked by major updates in the dot-zero release, and then minor, incremental updates come later. So it is with FreeBSD 8.1, which has just been released. It sports performance improvements, incremental fixes and some bug fixes over 8.0, which shipped last year. ServerWatch takes a closer look.
Putting out new releases of OS software isn’t always about adding major new features — sometimes it’s just about making existing features usable and stable. In the case of the open source software FreeBSD, that’s certainly the case with the newly hatched 8.1 release.
FreeBSD 8.1 is the latest version of the popular BSD server operating system, an update that provides some incremental improvements over the 8.0 release, which debuted in 2009. The FreeBSD 8.1 release might also spur users of older versions of FreeBSD to migrate to the new platform.