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title: "FreeBSD 5.0 Press Release"
sidenav: about
loadPress: false
---

= FreeBSD 5.0 Press Release

== FreeBSD Project announces FreeBSD 5.0

*Berkeley, CA - January 20, 2003 - The FreeBSD Project* The FreeBSD Project announced today the availability of FreeBSD 5.0 after almost three years of continuous development. The latest version of the project's powerful open source operating system includes several ground breaking features:

* *Multiprocessor support* has been extended and enhanced. We support SMP on all platforms, and have the infrastructure in place for extensive performance improvements.
* *Background filesystem checks* offer quicker start up in disaster situations.
* *File system snapshots* permit administrators to duplicate file systems in real time.
* *Experimental support for Mandatory Access Controls (MAC)* provides an extensible and flexible means for administrators to define system security policies.
* *Kernel Schedulable Entities* implement a high-performance many-to-many multiprocessor threading model.
* *Expanded hardware support* now includes hardware cryptographic acceleration, ACPI, Bluetooth, and FireWire.

The release also includes new, reimplemented, and incremental improvements in areas where FreeBSD already dominates, such as network performance, stability, and reliability.

"This release represents our largest engineering success to date.", says Murray Stokely, Vice President of Engineering at FreeBSD Mall Inc and member of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team. " The new technologies present in FreeBSD 5.X will provide our customers with exciting new functionality without sacrificing our legendary reliability."

== About the FreeBSD Project

The FreeBSD Project provides a free UNIX-like operating system for the Intel-compatible, Alpha, and Sparc platforms, based on the industry-standard Berkeley Software Distribution. The FreeBSD Project includes several thousand developers from dozens of countries around the world, who funnel their work through a team of several hundred committers. FreeBSD is available for free on the Internet, and as a shrink-wrap product through many different retail vendors, listed at link:../../commercial/[vendors]. For more information, please visit FreeBSD on the Web at http://www.FreeBSD.org/[www.FreeBSD.org].

== Press Contact

press@FreeBSD.org, or phone 1-925-674-0783
