Yesterday Ken Smith created the RLENG_8, which is required before being able to release any 8.x version at all. This is the first step that will finally lead up to BETA3, after which RC1 is planned. Beta3 also marks the end of the “liberal” ‘ok we still allow some new features if they had previously been discussed’. No more new features will be inserted when BETA3 becomes live. I will try to make a nice list of what’s new for 8.0 the moment BETA3 is tagged. The release is one step closer again!
On August 4, 2009, In FreeBSD, by Remko
The FreeBSD 8.0 code slush had been announced. This means that large projects are no longer allowed to do “drive by commits” to the head branch, but that there is an organisation behind it that checks everything and makes sure there are enough people to cover the project and make sure it’s in the best possible shape before the release. The release will take a little to get going, but the process had been started. From here on the team will have to manouver through a pipe that keeps getting smaller and smaller. If your favorite new feature is not in yet, don’t hold your breath because this might mean that it will take a little longer to get it in a first -RELEASE installation. Stay tuned!
FreeBSD 8.0’s code freeze is upcoming. The last hands are getting layed on importing crucial things that we want to have in FreeBSD 8.0. This is not an announcement that we will start freezing soon, but you might consider this as a pre-headsup. One of the features that I am personally proud of is the new TTY layer which is MPSafe from this release on. My friend Ed Schouten rewrote the code to make this happen and I am very excited to see it being put to it’s widest potentials.
But not only that, if we were to cut a 8.0 release -now- it would have the following features:
- new TTY layer
- hierarchical jails
- updated zic/timezone code
- various 802.11 fixes by Sam Leffler
- MLDv2
- new USB stack
- Network running entirely GIANT free
- IGMPv3
and many many features/stability/code improvements as well!
Be prepared for the actual code freeze
(There were some comments that were lost due to server rebuild problems :-/).
A long time discussions and development had been done on USB. Hans Peter Selasky (hps) had rewritten the entire USB stack and it seems to be moving forward enough so that Alfred Perlstein is willing to commit this into the FreeBSD tree.
Ofcourse things do not go without resistance, there are always (and will always be) people that are sceptic, against it, afraid of it etc. Not only developers, but consumers and people using this commercially as well. Nothing new there, nothing wrong there either.
So, with a bit of luck the new code will be in so that it can mature for the 8.0 release of FreeBSD.
Did you all know that there had been a lot of development for 8.0 btw? MPsafeTTY, USB, Dtrace, new ZFS drop, we migrated from CVS to SVN, we are working on LLVM (Contribute people!), even beter ULE support, Superpages got improved by alc@, NFS Locking and GSSAPI crypto, perhaps NFSv4, VImage (Marco Zec’s virtualized networking stack), and many many more new features that are not in the current -RELEASE tree’s, and will probably never be in these tree’s (it will be in future branches ofcourse). Ofcourse the above is no promise it will actually be in there, but as it currently looks like: chances are they will be there 
