FreeBSD 8.0 Beta 1 is now available

The first public test build of the FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE test cycle is now available, 8.0-BETA1.

At this point the beta is not quite ready for production systems but mostly because there is still some ongoing work in a few areas that may cause some changes in things like ABI/API. Debugging support (WITNESS, malloc debugging, etc.) are also still turned on and those tend to cause a performance hit.

There are no known issues that would cause data corruption or anything like that, just the issues with performance and potential for changes caused by ongoing work.

Here is the current target schedule for the other ‘major events’:

BETA2: July 13, 2009
BETA3: July 20, 2009
RC1: July 27, 2009
RC2: August 17, 2009
RELEASE: August 31, 2009

FreeBSD 8.0 Beta 1 is available for download from one of the mirrors.