Sneak Peek of PC-BSD® 8.1

These are exciting times on the PC-BSD® front! With 8.0 out the door, we’ve already finished most of the major enhancements for 8.1 (and are even starting work some features for 9.0).
FreeBSD 8.1 is slated for sometime late July, and we will be making a major effort to release PC-BSD® 8.1 very close to the same time. Since the installer for PC-BSD® is now able to load regular FreeBSD, we will attempt to stay as close in line with their releases as possible. This provides an alternate installation route for those wishing to take advantage of some of the features of our installation software. For 8.1 a number of bugs have been fixed for the new pc-sysinstall backend, and many new features have been added, such as: enhanced ZFS options, GELI passphrase support, support for >2TB GPT/EFI partitions and more.
While preparing for PC-BSD® 8.1, we’ve also begun to think ahead to version 9. One of the major features being worked on is a complete rewrite of the PBI format. This new PBI format will provide several notable new features. Similar to pc-sysinstall, the new PBI format abstracts the backend into stand-alone applications, which do not depend upon QT4. The naming conventions for these applications are similar to FreeBSD’s pkg_* commands, such as pbi_add, pbi_create, pbi_info, etc. This will allow the PBI management tools to be released as a FreeBSD port, and allow regular FreeBSD systems to take advantage of the self-contained PBI format. The new PBI format has also implemented a shared hash-directory of hard-links, which provide a few improvements, such as saving disk space by not keeping multiple copies of duplicate files on disk. In addition this also reduces the runtime memory footprint of applications which use the same libraries.
With these and other improvements coming down the pike, we are very excited about PC-BSD® and how these new features will enhance the user experience for both the PC-BSD® desktop and traditional FreeBSD users.
Kris Moore
PC-BSD Software Developer