Dear FreeBSD users!

Some of you may have not yet noticed, but FreeBSD 8.0 release cycle has begun its latest stage, i.e. the first public beta release, FreeBSD 8.0-BETA1, has been released today. The final release is due about the end of this summer, so stay tuned.

The ISO images should be by now available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites, and you are the most welcome to test those. We would like to hear your feedback, so that any outstanding bugs can be resolved before 8.0-RELEASE is out.

Please read the announcement carefully, as it contains some important information, mainly that this release still contains a lot of debugging features enabled by default (and as such is not ready for production environment). By now, the freebsd-update tool should be also ready for use.

This page may be of interest to you as well, as it contains some publicly accessible (but not an official standpoint of our release engineering team) information about the progress, known issues and open tasks involved in the release of FreeBSD 8.0.

On the other hand, an article by Ivan Voras talks about features that will, or might be present in the final release of FreeBSD 8.0, so if you are wondering about what’s cooking for this release, you definitely want to check that page out.