Murray Stokely announced today the availability of FreeBSD 4.8, following October’s 4.7 release [story] by 6 months. Included in 4.8 are “conservative updates” of a number of software programs from the base system, several known security fixes, initial Firewire support, HyperThreading support, and support of “other new hardware technologies“.
Murray notes, “This release does not include all of the new technologies that were introduced with FreeBSD 5.0 in January. FreeBSD 4.X releases offer a more conservative platform than FreeBSD 5.0 at this time.” In other words, 4.8 is currently considered to be the -stable production release, whereas 5.0 [story] remains the development or New Technology release, as reflected here. More information about 4.8 can be found in the release notes and known errata. Murray’s full announcement follows.