14 DAY TRIAL // A new Release Candidate for FreeBSD 10.1, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, is now out and ready for testing. The developers are getting really close to the final versions, which should land very soon.
This is the second RC for FreeBSD 10.1, and judging by the short list of changes and improvements, it might look like they are getting really close to that elusive stable release. To be fair, the first Beta for this new version was made available on September 15, so considering that this is a new RC, things are moving quite fast.
FreeBSD 10.0 has been received very well by the community and it's been a major leap from the previous 9.x branch. It's understandable why devs are now pushing for 10.1 and there is no reason why it shouldn't be a success as well, especially if we take into consideration the large number of updates and improvements that have already been implemented in the entire cycle.
Development pace is slowing down
As it was to be expected, the number of changes usually drops towards the end of the cycle and the same happened in this distro. Just a few fixes have been implemented and no new features have been added.
"The second RC build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures. If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list. If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system, use the 'releng/10.1' branch," say the developers in the announcement.
Interestingly enough, the devs have also issued a small warning regarding the update process for users with multi-disk ZFS setup. There can't be too many people with this configuration, but it's good to know.
"Important note to ZFS users on the i386 architecture: A regression has been discovered that affects multi-disk (mirror, raidz-1, raidz-2, etc.) installations that may cause a kernel panic on boot. If using a multi-disk ZFS setup, adding 'options KSTACK_PAGES=4' is suspected to resolve the problem.Do nonot* upgrade your system with freebsd-update(8) if using a multi-disk ZFS setup."
The official changelog comes with a complete list of instructions, including for update purposes. You can download FreeBSD 10.1 RC2 right now from Softpedia and give it a go. This is not a Live CD, so if you want to test it properly, you will have to install it.