This week the CVS tree has been tagged with 5.0-beta and work is being done to get it ready for its November release. You can see the announcement from Theo de Raadt here.

Peeter Hansteen, author of the indispensable The Book of PF has a very nice explanation of some of the things we can expect in 5.0 and how this is not a revolutionary release but an evolutionary one.

Some of the interesting things he mentions are that sysmerge(8) will now be available to run from the installer instead of having to boot from the CD or new bsd.rd RAM disk and later going through and merging /etc, and being able to install non-free firmware from the get-go.

You can see a list of changes already implemented since 4.9-release here.

I just installed a copy of the beta and started playing with it. So far I noticed that work on rc.d scripts continues to evolve as startup daemons in base now have individual scripts. In 4.9 rc scripts were only available for third-party software installed from packages or ports.