Yes, it has finally happened: m0n0wall 1.2b8 is out, and as announced
earlier, it's again based on FreeBSD 4.11 (since it has been
determined that the few advantages that FreeBSD 5.3 brought weren't
worth living with the inferior performance and other problems that
crept up). Chris Buechler and his team have done some preliminary
testing on it, and no major problems have been found so far.

The changes since 1.2b7 (other than going back to FreeBSD 4.11)
mostly consist of fixes to the captive portal, as well as several
kernel-level fixes contributed by Fred Wright (ipfilter window
scaling, ipnat ICMP checksum adjustment, DP83815 short cable bug
workaround, etc.). Support for device polling is compiled into the
kernel as well, although it's not enabled by default. Those who would
like to experiment with it can enable it using sysctl (see FreeBSD's
polling manpage).

Note that because 1.2b8 is based on FreeBSD 4.x, it won't support
Atheros-based wireless NICs, so if you absolutely need to use one,
you'll have to keep using 1.2b7 for the time being.

Until m0n0wall 1.2 is out, the focus is on stability, not lots of new
features, so m0n0wall 1.2 will most likely consist of 1.2b8 + bug
fixes + some minor improvements. After that, it'll be time to discuss
the future of m0n0wall.

Detailed change log and downloads:

http://m0n0.ch/wall/beta.php

Also, as promised, a complete guide to building a m0n0wall image from
scratch is now available:

http://m0n0.ch/wall/docbook-current/image-guide.html

While I put much effort into making sure that the guide is complete
and accurate, it's possible that there are some minor mistakes. If
you find any, please report them. The primary intention is not that
people will use the guide to actually build their own images from
scratch, but to document and preserve all the details so that people
who would like to make changes to an existing image can see how
m0n0wall and all of its parts are built.

Enjoy,

Manuel