<operating system> A free operating system based on the {BSD 4.4-lite} release from Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley. FreeBSD requires an ISA, EISA, VESA, or PCI based computer with an Intel 80386SX to Pentium CPU (or compatible AMD or Cyrix CPU) with 4 megabytes of RAM and 60MB of disk space. Some of FreeBSD's features are: preemptive multitasking with dynamic priority adjustment to ensure smooth and fair sharing of the computer between applications and users. Multiuser access - peripherals such as printers and tape drives can be shared between all users. Complete TCP/IP networking including SLIP, PPP, NFS and NIS. {Memory protection}, demand-paged virtual memory with a merged VM/buffer cache design. FreeBSD was designed as a {32 bit operating system}. X Window System (X11R6) provides a graphical user interface. Binary compatibility with many programs built for SCO, BSDI, NetBSD, 386BSD, and Linux. Hundreds of ready-to-run applications in the FreeBSD ports collection. FreeBSD is source code compatible with most popular commercial Unix systems and thus most applications require few, if any, changes to compile. {Shared libraries}. A full compliment of C, C++, Fortran and Perl development tools and many other languages. {Source code} for the entire system is available. Extensive on-line documentation. http://freebsd.org/. FreeBSD">ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD or try your nearest mirror site listed at the home site or buy the CD-ROM from Walnut Creek. (1998-11-24)

The jail mechanism is an implementation of FreeBSD's OS-level virtualisation that allows system administrators to partition a FreeBSD-derived computer system into several independent mini-systems called jails, all sharing the same kernel, with very little overhead. It is implemented through a system call, jail(2), as well as a userland utility, jail(8), plus, depending on the system, a number of other utilities.

The FreeBSD Ports collection is a package management system for the FreeBSD operating system, providing an easy and consistent way of installing software packages. As of February 2020, there are over 38,487 ports available in the collection.