A first Release Candidate is out now for public testing

May 5, 2017 12:58 GMT  ·  By

iXsystems' Kris Moore announced the general availability of a first Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming FreeNAS 11.0 open-source storage operating system.

It appears that this Release Candidate is also the first public development build of FreeNAS 11.0, as the team thoroughly tested the operating system for the past several months and decided that it's stable enough to be promoted straight to the RC state. As its version number suggests, development is currently based on the FreeBSD 11-STABLE operating system.

"We decided to start this series off with a Release Candidate (RC) version, because it is rebased on a newer version of FreeBSD (11-STABLE)," said Kris Moore, Director of Engineering at iXsystems. "This version has been tested in the nightlies for several months now, but just to play it safe we are asking for users to test out this release and let us know immediately if anything regresses."

FreeNAS 11.0 to offer an experimental new Angular-based UI

The FreeNAS 11.0 Release Candidate (RC) milestone includes numerous changes consisting of 23 new features and 111 bug fixes. Among some of the new features, we can mention support for Samba 4.5.3, an "Alerts UI" tab, a Jenkins plugin, a serial mode option to ISO installs, a MiddlewareD plugin for Consul-Alerts, as well as the ability to show FreeNAS' version number in main GUI.

A pipe viewer utility was introduced as well in FreeNAS 11.0 RC, along with an experimental new Angular-based UI, which users can try out from the login screen. Support for PMC Adaptec HBAs is also present, and virtualization support thanks to the implementation of a new VM page that promises to let users run their own operating systems on top of FreeNAS.

You should have a look at the multitude of bug fixes if you're curious to know what exactly was changed in this first Release Candidate of FreeNAS 11.0, which you can download right now from our website if you want to take it for a test drive and report bugs you may encounter. Please try to keep in mind, though, that this is a pre-release version and is not suitable for deployment in production environments.