FreeBSD 10 to come with major improvements

In case you are not familiar with FreeBSD, it is an operating system for a variety of platforms which focuses on features, speed, and stability. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley.

FreeBSD tends to lag behind the other free operating system releases in hardware support and new technology compatibility.

The FreeBSD team is making some serious strides though in resolving this as of version 10.

Here are the major fixes that are being focused on:

GCC out, Clang in. FreeBSD has been gravitating slowly away from using the GCC, not only because of its antiquated design, but also its GPL licensing, which was at odds with FreeBSD's far more liberal licensing. In place of GCC, FreeBSD now includes Clang/LLVM as its default C/C++ compiler, and FreeBSD has itself been built with LLVM since late 2012 or so.

Support for Hyper-V virtualization. Microsoft, NetApp, and Citrix have contributed code that allows FreeBSD to run well in Microsoft's virtualization solution without the need for additional software. Support for FreeBSD was originally announced by Microsoft back in 2012, but it's now being baked directly into FreeBSD.

EC2 integration. Those running FreeBSD on Amazon EC2 can now use the freebsd-update(8) utility to directly update EC2 images.

Improvements for ARM processors. The upgrades include support for superpages, which allows FreeBSD to work well with ARM hardware intended for servers; and additional support for ARMv7 and v7 processors, plus other system-on-chip designs.

Support for the Raspberry Pi. The explosively popular sub-$50 hobbyist's computer has nominally run Linux, but changes submitted to the FreeBSD code base now allow that OS to run on the Pi with minimal work. -This list provided by Infoworld

This is not all that FreeBSD 10 has to offer in it's upcoming release, these are just the major ones.

FreeBSD is also adding some defense against the NSA's attempt to gather information from it's users.

If you are interested in more information about FreeBSD, or you would like to download the ISO (Image file of the cd/dvd) then check the official FreeBSD page out.