Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 The FreeBSD Documentation Project
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The release notes for FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 7-STABLE development line. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.
This document contains the release notes for FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. It describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of FreeBSD. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of FreeBSD.
This distribution of FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE is a snapshot distribution. It can be found at http://www.FreeBSD.org/snapshots/ or any of its mirrors. More information on obtaining this (or other) snapshot distributions of FreeBSD can be found in the “Obtaining FreeBSD” appendix to the FreeBSD Handbook.
All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before installing FreeBSD. The errata document is updated with “late-breaking” information discovered late in the release cycle or after the release. Typically, it contains information on known bugs, security advisories, and corrections to documentation. An up-to-date copy of the errata for FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE can be found on the FreeBSD Web site.
This section describes the most user-visible new or changed features in FreeBSD since 6.0-RELEASE. In general, changes described here are unique to the 7-STABLE branch unless specifically marked as [MERGED] features.
Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 6.0-RELEASE, new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options, major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single change made to FreeBSD between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements.
Two remote denials of service in BIND (one involving DNSSEC and one involving recursive DNS queries) have been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:02.bind. [MERGED]
Processing of IPv6 type 0 Routing Headers is now controlled by the net.inet6.ip6.rthdr0_allowed sysctl variable, which defaults to
0 (off). For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:03.ipv6. [MERGED]
A potential heap overflow in the file(1) utility (and the libmagic(3) library on which it relies) has been fixed. More details can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:04.file. [MERGED]
Problems with libarchive(3) and tar(1) handling corrupted tar(5) archive files have been fixed. More details can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:05.libarchive. [MERGED]
A buffer overflow in tcpdump(1) has been corrected. More information can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:06.tcpdump. [MERGED]
A bug in named(8), which could result in an attacker being able to poison a resolver's DNS cache, has been fixed. More details are included in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:07.bind. [MERGED]
A buffer overflow in OpenSSL (fixed incorrectly in a previously security patch) has been corrected. More details can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:08.openssl. [MERGED]
An flaw that could lead to the disclosure of previously-generated random(4) data has been corrected. Information regarding this issue can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:09.random. [MERGED]
Information disclosure issues found in openpty(3) and ptsname(3) have been corrected. Information regarding this issue can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-08:01.pty. [MERGED]
A programming error in the inet_network(3) Internet address manipulation function that could lead to overwriting a region of memory with user defined data has been corrected. Information regarding this issue can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-08:02.libc. [MERGED]
An error that could allow sendfile(2) to inappropriately access the contents of a file has been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-08:03.sendfile. [MERGED]
acpi(4) now has support for the HPET time counter. [MERGED]
The
acpi_ibm(4)
driver now supports setting the fan control mode to manual or automatic, and adjusting
the fan speed if the fan control mode is manual. To enable manual control of the fan
speed, the sysctl variable dev.acpi_ibm.0.fan needs to be set to zero (manual). This
should only be used with extreme precaution, as disabling automatic fan control might
overheat the hardware and lead to permanent damage.
The apm(4) suspend/resume support has been improved.
The cpufreq(4) CPU frequency control framework is now enabled in the GENERIC kernel.
Support for the Camellia block cipher has been added to the FreeBSD kernel. It can now be specified as a cipher in ipsec(4) and geli(8). More information on Camellia can be found in RFC 4132.
The options COMPAT_43 kernel configuration option has been deemed unnecessary and has been removed from GENERIC and related kernel configurations. This change may result in a small performance increase for some workloads.
The dumb console driver ( dcons(4)) is now enabled in the GENERIC kernel.
The ddb(4) debugger now provides the show sleepq command. This takes a wait channel as an argument and looks for a sleep queue associated with that wait channel.
A bug in file descriptor handling such that a simple close(0); dup(fd) sequence does not return descriptor 0 in some cases, has been fixed.
The
gdb(1) remote
debugging interface now supports copying console messages to a remote debugger instance.
To enable this, set debug.gdbcons="1" in loader.conf, enter boot -d; gdb; step from
the loader prompt, then attach
gdb(1) from a
remote machine. The sysctl variable debug.gdbcons can be
used to turn on/off this functionality.
hwpmc(4) and pmcstat(8) now support profiling of dynamically loaded kernel modules and shared objects loaded with dlopen(3).
A new kern.hostuuid sysctl variable has been added to
hold a host's Universally Unique Identifier (UUID). This UUID is computed or generated by
a new rc.d/hostid startup script and, where possible, is saved
to disk to be persistent across reboots.
The INCLUDE_CONFIG_FILE kernel configuration option has
been improved. The full configuration of a running kernel can now be obtained via sysctl -b kern.conftxt. It can also be extracted from a kernel file
via config -x kernelfile. To preserve the literal kernel
configuration with all the comments included, the -C option
of
config(8) can be
used.
Support for Kernel Scheduled Entities (KSE) is now a kernel option (previously it was a mandatory feature in the kernel). It is enabled in the GENERIC kernel (thus there is no change in functionality) for all platforms except sun4v.
The Linux ABI support was enhanced to support emulation of Linux 2.6.16. This is not
enabled by default. To turn it on the compat.linux.osrelease
sysctl variable has to be set to 2.6.16. Note that this support
is still experimental.
Support for Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) and Extended Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI-X) has been added to the kernel's PCI support code. [MERGED]
The priv(9) kernel interface has been added. Its purpose is checking the availability of privilege for threads and credentials. Unlike the existing suser(9) interface, priv(9) exposes a named privilege identifier to the privilege checking code, allowing more complex policies regarding the granting of privilege to be expressed.
FreeBSD now supports concurrent read(2)/ readv(2) access to a file.
The kernel's sx(9) locks have been optimized to use simple atomic operations for the common cases of obtaining and releasing shared and exclusive locks. While this change is not generally user-visible, it is the basis for some substantial performance improvements.
The ULE process scheduler has been revised to improve its behavior, in particular interactivity under load, for both uniprocessor and multiprocessor machines. This implementation has commonly been referred to as “ULE 3.0”. (ULE 3.0 was formerly known as SCHED_SMP, which in turn was based on version 2.0 of the ULE scheduler. ULE 2.0 was never a part of any FreeBSD release, however it was the subject of many development, testing, and benchmarking efforts.)
The SIGCHLD signal queuing has been added. For each child
process whose status has been changed, a SIGCHLD instance is
queued. If the signal is still pending, and the process changed status several times, the
signal information is updated to reflect the latest process status. There is a loader
tunable kern.sigqueue.queue_sigchild which can control the
behavior, setting it to zero disables the SIGCHLD queuing
feature.
A new sysctl variable kern.malloc_stats has been added.
This allows exporting of kernel malloc statistics via a binary structure stream.
A new sysctl variable kern.forcesigexit has been added.
This forces a process to sigexit if a trap signal is being held by the current thread or
ignored by the current process. It is enabled by default.
The pcvt(4) driver, an alternative to syscons(4), has been removed, as it had fallen out of sync with the rest of the kernel.
RedZone, a buffer corruption protection for the kernel malloc(9) facility has been implemented. This detects both buffer underflows and overflows at runtime on free(9) and realloc(9), and prints backtraces from where memory was allocated and from where it was freed. For more details, see the redzone(9) manual page.
A new loader tunable vm.kmem_size_min has been added.
This allows to specify a minimal size for vm.kmem_size.
A new sysctl variable vm.zone_stats has been added. This
allows to export
uma(9) allocator
statistics via a binary structure stream.
The sysctl variable hw.pci.do_powerstate has been split
into two sysctl variables hw.pci.do_powerstate_nodriver and
hw.pci.do_powerstate_resume. Also, these variables have been
changed from a boolean to a range. 0 means no power management,
1 means conservative power management which any device class
that has caused problems is added to the watch list, 2 means
aggressive power management where any device class that is not fundamental to the system
is added to the list, and 3 means power them all down
unconditionally. The default values are 0 for hw.pci.do_powerstate_nodriver and 1 for
hw.pci.do_powerstate_resume.
[ia64] The GENERIC kernel now enables SMP support by default.
Sample kernel configuration files src/sys/arch/conf/MAC for the Mandatory Access Control framework have been added.
POSIX_TIMERS support has been updated to 200112L.
An experimental support for POSIX message queue has been implemented.
The locking strategy for UNIX domain sockets has been revised to improve concurrency; this change has yielded substantial performance improvements on various SMP workloads (in particular, MySQL on 8-way amd64 systems) with little or no measured overhead on UP systems.
Several minor but widespread changes to the Newbus API have been made In order to support some on-going work with interrupt filtering. Because this change also breaks the kernel ABI, all third-party device drivers will need to be modified and recompiled.
A new option -S, which allows setting the boot2 serial console speed in the /boot.config file or on the boot:
prompt line, has been added.
[amd64, i386] firewire(4) and dcons(4) support has been added to the boot loader. To enable it, LOADER_FIREWIRE_SUPPORT=yes has to be added to /etc/make.conf and the loader be rebuilt.
[pc98] The IPLware support in boot0.5 has been enhanced to support version 3.33.
The cardbus(4), pccard(4), pccbb(4), and ex(4) drivers are now buildable as kernel modules.
An acpi_dock(4) driver has been added to provide support for controlling laptop docking station functions via ACPI. [MERGED]
The acpi_thermal(4) driver now supports overriding the _PSV, _HOT, and _CRT temperature values.
Support for the alpha architecture has been removed. Alpha support will remain on the RELENG_5 and RELENG_6 codelines.
The cardbus(4) driver now supports /dev/cardbus%d.cis.
[i386, amd64] The coretemp(4) driver has been added to provide temperature readings on Intel® Core™ processors. [MERGED]
The est cpufreq(4) driver now supports frequency control for the VIA C7-M family of processors.
The firewire(4) code is now MPSAFE.
icee(4), a generic I2C EEPROM driver, has been added.
A bug which prevented the ichsmb(4) kernel module from unloading has been fixed.
[amd64, i386] Dual-core processors (such as the Intel Core Duo) now have both cores available for use by default in SMP-enabled kernels. [MERGED]
[ia64, powerpc] The loader tunable debug.mpsafevfs is set
to 1 by default.
The sab(4) driver has been removed (it has been superceded by the scc(4) driver).
The scc(4) driver has been added. This provides generic support for serial communications controllers and delegates the control over each channel and mode to a subordinate driver such as uart(4).
[amd64] The smbios(4) driver support for amd64 has been added.
[sun4v] FreeBSD now has preliminary support for the Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC-T1 architecture. FreeBSD/sun4v has been demonstrated to run on the Sun Fire T1000 and Sun Fire T2000 servers. More information can be found on the sun4v Project page.
The tnt4882(4) driver, which supports the National Instruments PCI-GPIB card, has been added.
[amd64, i386, ia64, sparc64] The uart(4) driver has been included in the GENERIC kernel by default. When both sio(4) and uart(4) can handle a given serial port, sio(4) will claim it.
The uark(4) driver, which supports the Arkmicro Technologies ARK3116-based USB serial adapter, has been added.
The uart(4) driver now supports LOM (Lights Out Management) and RSC (Remote System Control) devices as consoles.
The zs driver has been removed. Its functionality has been superceded by that of the uart(4) driver.
[i386] A new loader tunable hw.apic.enable_extint has
been added. This tunable can be used to disable masking of the ExtINT pin on the first
I/O APIC. At least one chipset for the Intel Pentium III seems to need this, even though
all of the pins in the 8259As are masked. The default is still to mask the ExtINT
pin.
The new midi(4) driver which is based on NetBSD's one has been added. This supports snd_cmi(4) and snd_emu10k1(4) drivers.
The snd_cmi(4) driver is now MPSAFE.
The snd_emu10kx(4) driver has been added. It supports Creative SoundBlaster Live! and Audigy series sound cards with optional pseudo-multichannel playback.
The snd_envy24(4) driver has been added to support the Envy24 series of audio chips. [MERGED]
The snd_envy24ht(4) driver has been added to support the VIA Envy24HT series of audio chips. [MERGED]
The snd_hda(4) driver has been added. It supports devices that conform to revision 1.0 of the Intel High Definition Audio specification. [MERGED]
The snd_solo(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]
The snd_spicds(4) driver has been added to support I2S SPI audio codec chips. [MERGED]
The uaudio(4) driver now supports 24/32 bit audio formats and conversion.
The ath(4) driver has been updated to HAL version 0.9.20.3. [MERGED]
The axe(4) driver now supports altq(4). [MERGED]
The bge(4) driver's Jumbo frame support is now MPSAFE.
The bge(4) driver now supports big-endian architectures such as sparc64.
The cm(4) driver is now MPSAFE.
The cxgb(4) driver has been added. It provides support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters based on the Chelsio T3 and T3B chipsets. [MERGED]
The edsc(4) driver, which provides Ethernet discard network interfaces, has been added. [MERGED]
The el(4) driver has been removed due to lack of use.
The em(4) driver has been updated to version 6.7.3 from Intel. Among other changes, it now supports 80003, 82571, 82571EB, 82572 and 82575 based adapters, as well as onboard-NICs on ICH8-based motherboards. [MERGED]
The em(4) driver now includes initial support for suspend and resume features.
The performance of the em(4) driver has been improved by using a fast interrupt handler and taskqueue instead of ithread handler. This change can be disabled by defining NO_EM_FASTINTR kernel option for debugging purpose.
The IP over FireWire ( fwip(4)) driver is now enabled in the GENERIC kernel.
The gem(4) driver now supports altq(4).
The firmware images needed by the ipw(4) driver are now part of the FreeBSD base system. For the loaded firmware to work the license at /usr/share/doc/legal/intel_ipw/LICENSE must be agreed to and legal.intel_ipw.license_ack=1 has to be added to /boot/loader.conf. Prior versions of the driver used the firmware image in the net/ipw-firmware-kmod port/package or the net/ipw-firmware port/package.
The iwi(4) driver now supports big-endian architectures such as sparc64.
The firmware images needed by the iwi(4) driver are now part of the FreeBSD base system. For the loaded firmware to work the license at /usr/share/doc/legal/intel_iwi/LICENSE must be agreed to and legal.intel_iwi.license_ack=1 has to be added to /boot/loader.conf. Prior versions of the driver used the firmware image in the net/iwi-firmware-kmod port/package or the net/iwi-firmware port/package.
The ixgbe driver, which supports the Intel 10G PCI-Express adapter (82598), has been added.
The lnc(4) driver has been removed. The le(4) and pcn(4) drivers support all devices that were supported by lnc(4).
The msk(4) driver has been added. It supports network interfaces using the Marvell/SysKonnect Yukon II Gigabit Ethernet controller. [MERGED]
[amd64, i386] The mxge(4) driver, which supports Myricom Myri10GE 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, has been added. For more details, see mxge(4). [MERGED]
[amd64, i386] The nfe(4) driver, an open-source driver for nForce Ethernet devices, has been added, originally from OpenBSD. This driver has replaced the nve(4) driver in the GENERIC kernel.
[arm] The npe(4) driver, which supports the Intel XScale Network Processing Engine, has been added. [MERGED]
The nxge(4) driver, which supports the Neterion Xframe 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter, has been added.
The re(4) driver now supports the D-Link DGE-528(T) Gigabit Ethernet card.
The rum(4) driver has been added. It supports WLAN adapters based on the Ralink RT2501USB and RT2601USB chipsets.
The ti(4) driver now supports big-endian architectures such as sparc64.
The ufoma(4) driver for FOMA (third generation mobile phone system by NTT DoCoMo, Inc. in Japan) has been added. This should support other third generation mobile phones since the driver is based on USB Implementation Guideline from MCPC (Mobile Computing Promotion Consortium) in Japan.
The vgapci(4) driver has been added. This is a stub device driver for VGA PCI devices and serves as a bus so that other drivers such as drm(4), acpi_video(4), and agp(4) can attach to it thus allowing multiple drivers for the same device.
The vge(4) driver now supports altq(4). [MERGED]
The wi(4) driver is now buildable as a kernel module.
[amd64, i386, pc98] The wlan_wep(4), wlan_ccmp(4), and wlan_tkip(4) drivers have been included in the GENERIC kernel by default.
[amd64, i386] The wpi(4) driver has been added to support the Intel 3945 Wireless LAN Controller.
[amd64, i386] The zyd(4) driver has been added. It provides support for ZyDAS ZD1211/ZD1211B USB IEEE 802.11 b/g wireless network devices.
The network interface groups feature has been imported from OpenBSD. This feature allows an administrator to, for example, apply firewall rules to an entire group of interfaces. More information can be found in ifconfig(8).
The 802.11 protocol stack has been significantly reworked. Among the new features are support for background scanning and roaming between APs, as well as support that will be required by 802.11n-capable devices.
The 802.11 protocol stack now has support for 900 MHz cards, as well as quarter- and half-channel support for 802.11a. [MERGED]
The FreeBSD network stack now runs entirely free of the Giant kernel lock, and relies solely on the kernel's fine-grained locking primitives to manage parallelism. This significantly improves the network stack's performance on multi-processor systems; uni-processor systems could also see performance gains. ISDN4BSD and netatm have been temporarily disconnected from the build. These modules all require the Giant kernel lock for their operation; disconnecting them allows the removal of the NET_NEEDS_GIANT compatability shim. It is planned to convert these modules to fine-grained kernel locking and re-connect them for FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE.
[amd64, i386, pc98] An experimental BPF Just-In-Time compiler has been implemented for
both
bpf(4) and
ng_bpf(4). To
enable this, the options BPF_JITTER kernel option is needed. The
net.bpf_jitter.enable can be used to disable this
feature.
The bpf(4) device now supports several new ioctl(2) calls to allow examining inbound vs. outbound packets, as well as packets that have been injected onto the network.
The bridge(4) driver has been removed from the tree. Its functionality has been completely replaced by if_bridge(4).
The gre(4) driver, which is for GRE encapsulation found in RFC 1701 and RFC 1702, now supports IPv6 over GRE.
The if_bridge(4) driver now supports RSTP, the Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (802.1w). [MERGED]
The if_bridge(4) driver now supports a private flag on bridge ports; no private port on a bridge can communicate with any other private port. This functionlity is useful in scenarios such as number of customers VLANs bridged with a server network; it might be desirable to prevent the customer VLANs from communicating with each other but allow all of them to access the server network. The private flag on a bridge port can be set or cleared via ifconfig(8).
A hard-coded limit on the number of IPv4 multicast group memberships (formerly 20) has been removed.
IPv6 multicast forwarding is now dynamically loadable, via the ip_mroute.ko module.
The ipfw(4) packet filter now supports filtering on Routing Header Type 0 and Mobile IPv6 Routing Header Type 2 in addition to filtering on the non-differentiated presence of any Routing Header.
The ip6fw(8) packet filter has been removed. Since ipfw(4) has gained IPv6 support, it should be used instead. Please note that some rules might need to be adjusted.
The KAME IPsec implementation has been removed. In its place, FAST_IPSEC is now the only IPsec implementation supported by the FreeBSD kernel. The IPSEC kernel configuration option, which formerly enabled KAME IPsec, now enables FAST_IPSEC. FAST_IPSEC now supports both IPv4 and IPv6, uses fine-grained kernel locking, and supports hardware cryptographic acceleration.
Support for tunneling IPX over IP has been removed.
The lagg(4) driver, ported from OpenBSD and NetBSD, has been added to support a variety of protocols and algorithms for link aggregation, failover, and fault tolerance. [MERGED]
The natm(4), Native Mode ATM protocol layer is now MPSAFE.
The ng_car(4) Netgraph node has been added. It implements various traffic shaping and rate limiting algorithms.
A new ng_deflate(4) Netgraph node type has been added. It implements Deflate PPP compression. [MERGED]
The ng_h4(4) Netgraph node is now MPSAFE.
The ng_ppp(4) Netgraph node is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]
A new ng_pred1(4) Netgraph node type has been added to implement Predictor-1 PPP compression. [MERGED]
The default retransmit timer for NFS over TCP is now 60 seconds. This change prevents
the unnecessary retransmission of non-idempotent NFS requests. The nfs_access_cache variable in
rc.conf(5) has
also been changed to 60.
The default minimum number of nfsiod kernel threads (
sysctl(8)
variable vfs.nfs.iodmin) has been changed from 4 to 0.
A new sysctl variable net.inet.icmp.reply_from_interface
has been added. This allows the
icmp(4) reply to
non-local packets to be generated with the IP address the packet came through in. This is
useful for routers to show in
traceroute(8)
the actual path a packet has taken instead of the possibly different return path.
A new sysctl variable net.inet.icmp.quotelen has been
added. This allows to change length of the quotation of the original packet in an ICMP
reply. The minimum of 8 bytes is internally enforced. The maximum quotation is the
remaining space in the reply mbuf. This option is added in response to the issues raised
in I-D draft-gont-icmp-payload-00.txt.
The icmp(4) now always quotes the entire TCP header when responding and allocate an mbuf cluster if needed. This change fixes the TCP issues raised in I-D draft-gont-icmp-payload-00.txt.
A new socket option IP_MINTTL has been added. This may be used to set the minimum acceptable TTL a packet must have when received on a socket. All packets with a lower TTL are silently dropped. This works on already connected/connecting and listening sockets for RAW, UDP, and TCP. This option is only really useful when set to 255, preventing packets from outside the directly connected networks reaching local listeners on sockets. Also, this option allows userland implementation of “The Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (GTSM)” found in RFC 3682.
The kernel ppp(4) driver now supports IPv6.
Stealth forwarding now supports IPv6 as well as IPv4. This behavior can be controlled
by using a new sysctl variable net.inet6.ip6.stealth.
The PIM kernel option has been removed. The corresponding code is now included in the MROUTING kernel option.
Support has been added for the RFC 3678 Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) socket API. More details can be found in the sourcefilter(3) manual page.
Support has been added for the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). SCTP implements a reliable, message-oriented transport protocol, and is defined in RFC 4960. It is enabled in FreeBSD with the SCTP kernel option and is part of the GENERIC kernel. More information can be found in the sctp(4) manual page.
The IPV6_V6ONLY socket option now works for UDP.
The TCP_DROP_SYNFIN kernel option is now included in the
kernel by default. The net.inet.tcp.drop_synfin sysctl
variable still defaults to 0.
The FreeBSD network stack now has support for TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO). TSO reduces the overhead of sending bulk TCP data by allowing a network interface to convert a large data transfer into multiple TCP segments to be sent on the network. This functionality can be enabled or disabled on a per-interface basis with the tso and -tso flags to ifconfig(8). Network interfaces and drivers supporting TSO currently include em(4), mxge(4) and cxgb(4).
FreeBSD now supports auto-sizing of TCP socket buffers. This allows the socket buffer
sizes to adapt dynamically to network conditions, rather than being set statically. The
behavior of this feature can be controlled using the net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_* and net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_* sysctl variables.
The net.link.tap.up_on_open sysctl variable has been
added to the
tap(4) driver.
If enabled, new tap devices will marked up upon creation.
[MERGED]
The aac(4) driver now supports the Adaptec 2610SA SATA-RAID controller in some Hewlett-Packard machines.
The ahc(4) driver is now MPSAFE.
The ahd(4) driver is now MPSAFE.
The CAM subsystem is now MPSAFE.
The ciss(4) driver is now MPSAFE.
A new GEOM_JOURNAL class has been added to the GEOM storage transformation system. It supports block-level journaling operations, which can be used by file system modules to perform file system journaling and to keep file systems in a consistent state. (Currently, only UFS file systems are supported.) Its operation can be controlled using the gjournal(8) utility.
A new GEOM_MULTIPATH class has been added to support multiple access paths to disk devices. The gmultipath(8) utility has been added to control the behavior of disk devices using this feature.
A new GEOM_VIRSTOR class has been added to provide virtual storage devices of arbitrary size with physical devices as backing store. More information can be found in the manual page for its control utility, gvirstor(8).
The GEOM class kernel module g_md.ko has been renamed to geom_md.ko for consistency.
[amd64, i386] The hptiop(4) driver has been added. It supports the Highpoint RocketRAID 3xxx and 4xxx series of SAS and SATA RAID controllers.
[amd64, i386] The hptrr(4) driver has been added, to support several HighPoint RocketRAID controllers (more details can be found in the manual page). [MERGED]
[amd64, i386] The hptmv(4) driver has been updated and now supports amd64 as well as PAE.
The isp(4) driver is now MPSAFE.
The mpt(4) driver has been updated to support various new features such as RAID volume and RAID member state/settings reporting, periodic volume re-synchronization status reporting, and sysctl variables for volume re-synchronization rate, volume member write cache status, and volume transaction queue depth. [MERGED]
The mpt(4) driver now supports SAS HBA (partially), 64-bit PCI, and large data transfer. [MERGED]
The mpt(4) driver is now MPSAFE.
The rr232x(4) driver, which appeared in some older versions of FreeBSD, is no longer supported, and has been superceded by the hptrr(4) driver. At the request of Highpoint, the rr232x(4) driver has been removed. [MERGED]
The twa(4) driver has been updated to the 3.70.03.007 release on the 3ware Web site. It now supports AMCC's 3ware 9650 series of SATA controllers. [MERGED]
The iscsi_initiator(4) driver, a kernel driver for the Internet SCSI (iSCSI) protocol, has been added. This driver allows access to remote SCSI devices over TCP/IP networks. The iscontrol(8) userland utility is used to control the operation of the driver.
The scsi_sg driver, which emulates a significant subset of the Linux SCSI SG passthrough device API, has been added. It is intended to allow programs running under Linux emulation (as well as native FreeBSD applications) to access the /dev/sg* devices supported by Linux. [MERGED]
The umass(4) driver now supports PLAY_MSF, PLAY_TRACK, PLAY_TRACK_REL, PAUSE, PLAY_12 commands so that the cdcontrol(1) utility can handle a USB CD drive.
A part of the FreeBSD NFS subsystem (the interface with the protocol stack and callouts, the NFS client side) is now MPSAFE.
The pseudofs(9) pseudo file system construction kit and all of its consumers ( procfs(5), linprocfs(5) and linsysfs(5)), are now MPSAFE.
[amd64, i386] Experimental support for the TMPFS file system has been added. TMPFS is an efficient memory file system originally developed for the NetBSD project during the Google Summer of Code. More information can be found in the tmpfs(5) manual page.
The unionfs file system has been re-implemented. This version solves many crashing and locking issues compared to the previous implementation. It also adds new “transparent” and “masquerade” modes for automatically creating files in the upper file system layer of unions. More information can be found in the mount_unionfs(8) manual page. [MERGED]
[amd64, i386, pc98] Support for Sun's ZFS has been added. More information about this file system can be found in the zfs(8) manual page or on the OpenSolaris ZFS page.
Initial (read-only) support for SGI's XFS file system has been added.
The addr2ascii() and ascii2addr() library calls, originally introduced by the INRIA IPv6 implementation, have been removed from libc. They have no consumers in the FreeBSD base system. In a related change, support for AF_LINK addresses has been added to getnameinfo(3).
Padding of ai_addrlen in struct
addrinfo has been removed, which was originally for the ABI compatibility. For
example, this change breaks the ABI compatibility of the
getaddrinfo(3)
function on 64-bit architectures, including FreeBSD/amd64, FreeBSD/ia64, and
FreeBSD/sparc64.
The atrun(8) utility has gained PAM support. Before running a job for a user account, it will check the account status with PAM and refuse to run the job if the account is unavailable. The default definition of an unavailable account includes those expired and administratively locked out with pw(8).
The camcontrol(8) utility now supports a readcap command to display the size of devices. [MERGED]
The cron(8) daemon has gained PAM support. Before running a command from account's private crontab(5) file, it will check the account status with PAM and skip the command if the account is unavailable. The default definition of an unavailable account includes those expired and administratively locked out with pw(8). In addition, cron(8) will skip commands from private crontab(5) files if a nologin(5) file exists, unless the crontab(5) owner's login class is exempt from nologin(5) restriction. Commands from the system file /etc/crontab are not subject to the PAM check.
The dhclient(8) program now supports the Classless Static Route option as described in RFC 3442.
The dump(8) and restore(8) programs now attempt to save and restore extended attribute information on files.
A libelf library implementing the SVR4 elf(3) / gelf(3) API for manipulating ELF files has been added.
The
fdisk(8) program
now supports a -p flag to print the slice table in fdisk
configuration format. [MERGED]
T/TCP support in
finger(1) (and
the -T flag used to enable it) has been removed.
A bug in the
find(1) program
which prevents numeric arguments for -user and -group from working as expected has been fixed.
The freebsd-update(8) command now supports an upgrade command to perform binary upgrades between different versions of FreeBSD. [MERGED]
The
ftpd(8) utility
now has support for RFC2389 (FEAT) and rudimentary support for RFC2640 (UTF8). The
RFC2640 support is optional and can be enabled using the new -8 flag. More information can be found in the
ftpd(8) manual
page. [MERGED]
The gcc(1) SSP (Stack-Smashing Protector) support is now enabled by default.
The
gbde(8) utility
now supports -k and -K options to
specify a key file in addition to a passphrase.
The gpt(8) utility now supports setting GPT partition labels.
The gvinum(8) utility now supports the resetconfig sub-command.
An implementation of Generic Security Service API (GSS-API) version 2 and its C binding described in RFC2743 and RFC2744 has been added. This is a new extensible GSS-API layer which can support GSS-API plugins, similar to the Solaris implementation, and the Kerberos 5 GSS mechanism has been rewritten as a plugin library for the new implementation.
The hccontrol(8) utility now supports HCI node autodetection.
The id(1) utility now prints the effective user ID after the group ID.
The ipfwpcap(8) utility has been added; it captures packets on a divert(4) socket and writes them as pcap(3) (also known as tcpdump(1)) format data to a file or pipe. [MERGED]
The kdump(1) program now supports printing flags in a system call argument by using symbol names.
The
kenv(1) utility
now supports a -q flag to suppress warnings.
kgdb(1) now
supports a -w option to open kmem-based targets in read-write
mode. This allows one to use kgdb on /dev/mem and be able to
patch memory on a live system.
The libarchive(3) library now supports POSIX.1e-style Extended Attributes.
The libarchive(3) library now contains support for ar(1)-style archives.
The libc library now includes initial implementation of symbol maps and symbol version definitions.
The libedit library has been updated from the NetBSD source tree as of August 2005.
The libm library now includes initial implementation of symbol maps and symbol version definitions.
A new malloc(3) implementation has been introduced. This implementation, sometimes referred to as “jemalloc”, was designed to improve the performance of multi-threaded programs, particularly on SMP systems, while preserving the performance of single-threaded programs. Due to the use of different algorithms and data structures, jemalloc may expose some previously-unknown bugs in userland code, although most of the FreeBSD base system and common ports have been tested and/or fixed. Note that jemalloc uses mmap(2) to obtain memory and only uses sbrk(2) under limited circumstances (and then only for 32-bit architectures). As a result, the datasize resource limit has little practical effect for typical applications. The vmemoryuse resource limit, however, can be used to bound the total virtual memory used by a process, as described in limits(1).
The mdconfig(8) utility now supports producing device listings formatted as XML. Currently, the list and query sub-commands support this feature.
The
mdconfig(8)
utility's -u option now supports specifying multiple devices
separated by comma character.
The
mdmfs(8) utility
now supports a -P flag to allow skipping the
newfs(8) process
when using a vnode-backed disk.
The
mdmfs(8) utility
now supports a -E flag to allow to specify location of the
mdconfig(8)
utility instead of using the default one (/sbin/mdconfig).
A new function memmem(3) has been implemented in libc. This is the binary equivalent to strstr(3) and found in glibc.
The mount(8) dev and nodev options have been removed.
The mount(8) utility now supports mqueuefs(5).
A bug which prevents the mount(8) utility from converting a read-only mount to read-write via mount -u -o rw, has been fixed.
A number of the file system-specific mount_* utilities have been removed, in favor of the more
general
mount(8) command
with a -t option. Specifically, these commands are: mount_devfs, mount_ext2fs, mount_fdescfs, mount_linprocfs, mount_procfs, mount_std, mount_linsysfs, mount_reiserfs, and mount_umapfs.
The mrouted(8) multicast routing daemon has been removed from the FreeBSD base system. It implements the DVMRP multicast routing protocol, which has largely been replaced by PIM in many multicast installations. The related map-mbone(8) and mrinfo(8) utilities have also been removed. These programs are now available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection as net/mrouted.
The netstat(1) utility now supports printing sctp(4) protocol statistics.
The /etc/nsswitch.conf file is now installed statically instead of being generated on every reboot.
The objformat(1) utility and getobjformat(3) library (the last remnants of a.out object file support) have been removed.
The pam_nologin(8) module no longer provides an authentication function; instead it now provides an account management function. Third-party files in /usr/local/etc/pam.d may need manual editing; specifically, lines in these files of the form:
auth required pam_nologin.so no_warn
These lines need to have the word auth replaced with the word account.
nscd(8) has been added. It is a daemon that caches the results of nsswitch lookups (such as those to the password, group, and services databases) for improved performance.
The
pkill(1) utility
now supports a -F option which allows to restrict matches to
a process whose PID is stored in the pidfile file. When another new option -L is also specified, the pidfile file must be locked with the
flock(2) syscall
or created with
pidfile(3).
The
pkill(1) utility
now supports a -I flag which works like -i of rm(1). When this flag
is specified,
pkill(1) will
ask for confirmation before sending a signal to each matching process.
The
pmcstat(8)
program has seen several enhancements: It can now log over a network socket to a remote
host. The -c now takes a comma-seperated list of CPUs to
configure for PMC allocation. The -t option has been enhanced
to take a regular expression for selecting processes based on their command names.
pmcstat(8) now
allocates system PMCs on all CPUs by default, not just CPU 0.
The
powerd(8)
program now supports a -P option, which specifies a pidfile
to use.
The pw(8) program now
supports a -M option to set the permissions of a user's newly
created home directory. [MERGED]
The DNS resolver library in FreeBSD's libc has been updated to that from BIND 9.4.1.
The
rpcbind(8)
program can now bind its TCP listening socket to an IP address other than INADDR_ANY
using the -h flag. The new -6
flag allows it to bind to IPv6 addresses only.
The rpcgen(1) utility now generates headers and stub files that can be used with ANSI C compilers by default.
The
rpc.lockd(8) and
rpc.statd(8)
programs now accept -p options to indicate which port they
should bind to. [MERGED]
The
rtld(1) runtime
linker now supports ELF symbol versioning using GNU semantics. This implementation aims
to be compatible with symbol versioning support as implemented by GNU libc and documented
in http://people.redhat.com/~drepper/symbol-versioning and LSB 3.0. Also,
dlvsym() function has been added to allow lookups for a
specific version of a given symbol.
The sa(8) utility now
supports -U and -P flags. They
can be used to specify the per-user and per-process summary file location,
respectively.
The sade(8) disk partitioning and labeling utility has been added. This utility is based on the partition editing bits of sysinstall(8).
A bug in the sed(1) utility which can cause incorrect calculation of pattern space length in some cases has been fixed.
The sed(1) utility now supports case-insensitive pattern matching; this feature can be enabled by using the I flag after the closing delimiter for a regular expression.
The behavior of the setenv(3) family of library calls has been changed from the historic BSD API to the behavior mandated by POSIX. As a result, several base system utility that relied on the old API have been updated to track this change.
The -h flag to
setfacl(1) now
properly sets the ACL on a symbolic link, not the link target.
The
sockstat(1)
utility, which shows connected and listening network sockets, now supports a new -P command-line option, which can be used to filter displayed
sockets by protocol name (as listed in
protocols(5)).
The
sysctl(8)
utility now supports a -q flag to suppress a limited set of
warnings and errors.
The version of tcpslice in the FreeBSD base system has been removed due to obsolescence. A more up-to-date version can be found in the Ports Collection as net/tcpslice.
The time(1) utility now prints the time that a given command has been running if sent a SIGINFO signal.
The
top(1) program
now supports a -a flag to display process titles from their
argument vectors; this feature is useful for watching processes that change their titles
via
setproctitle(3).
The
top(1) program
now supports a -j flag to display the
jail(8) ID for
each process. [MERGED]
The
touch(1) utility
now supports a -A flag that allows the access and
modification times of a file to be adjusted by a specified value. [MERGED]
The
truss(1) utility
now supports an -s flag for the same functionality as the
strace utility (devel/strace).
The truss(1) utility no longer depends on the availability of the procfs(5) file system; it uses the ptrace(2) interface instead for controlling a traced process.
[powerpc] The truss(1) utility now supports FreeBSD/powerpc.
The usbd(8) utility has been removed. The devd(8) utility and its configuration file now support functionality which is equivalent to it.
The uuidgen(1) utility has been moved from /usr/bin to /bin.
The vnconfig(8) utility, which was long ago replaced by mdconfig(8), has been removed.
The wicontrol(8) utility has been removed. Configuration functions for wi(4) interfaces should be performed using ifconfig(8).
The shared library version number of all libraries has been updated due to some possible ABI changes. The libraries include: snmp_*, libdialog, libg2c, libobjc, libreadline, libregex, libstdc++, libkrb5, libalias, libarchive, libbegemot, libbluetooth, libbsnmp, libbz2, libc_r, libcrypt, libdevstat, libedit, libexpat, libfetch, libftpio, libgpib, libipsec, libkiconv, libmagic, libmp, libncp, libncurses, libnetgraph, libngatm, libopie, libpam, libpthread, libradius, libsdp, libsmb, libtacplus, libthr, libthread_db, libugidfw, libusbhid, libutil, libvgl, libwrap, libypclnt, libm, libcrypto, libssh, and libssl.
The wcsdup() function has been implemented. This
function is popular in Microsoft and GNU systems.
The wlandebug(8) utility has been added to the main FreeBSD source tree (it previously lived in a tools area). It provides control over a number of types of debugging output in the wlan(4) module and related drivers, and can be useful for debugging wireless issues.
The wpa_passphrase(8) utility has been added. It generates a 256-bit pre-shared WPA key from an ASCII passphrase. [MERGED]
The ftpd script for stand-alone ftpd(8) has been added.
The gbde_swap script has been removed in favor a new encswap script which also supports geli(8) for swap encryption.
The geli and geli2 scripts has been added for geli(8) device configuration on boot.
The ike script for IPsec IKE daemon has been removed because no such daemon is included in the base system.
The mdconfig script to handle vnode backed md(4) devices has
been added. This is a replacement of the ramdisk script, and
all of variables in ramdisk_* have been changed to mdconfig_*. Also, two new
rc.conf(5)
variables mdconfig_*_files and mdconfig_*_cmd have been added. For example:
mdconfig_md0="-t malloc -s 10m" mdconfig_md1="-t vnode -f /var/foo.img"
The rcconf.sh script in /etc/rc.d
has been removed and a variable early_late_divider, which
designates the script to separate the early and late stages of the boot process, has been
added.
The rc.initdiskless script now uses tar(1) instead of pax(1) because pax(1) needs a writable temporary directory that may not be available when this script runs.
The pccard script has been removed since OLDCARD is deprecated.
The sendmail script no longer rebuilds the aliases database
if it is missing or older than the aliases file. [MERGED] If desired, set the new rc.conf
option sendmail_rebuild_aliases to "YES" to restore that
functionality.
The removable_interfaces variable has been removed.
A new keyword NOAUTO in ifconfig_ifn has been added. This prevents configuration of
an interface at boot time or via /etc/pccard_ether, and allows
/etc/rc.d/netif to be used to start and stop an interface on a
purely manual basis.
The /etc/rc.d/nfslocking script has been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. It has been replaced by the /etc/rc.d/lockd and /etc/rc.d/statd scripts. [MERGED]
Intel ACPI-CA has been updated to 20070320.
awk has been updated from the 24 April 2005 release to the 1 May 2007 release. [MERGED]
BIND has been updated from 9.3.3 to 9.4.2.
BSNMPD has been updated from 1.11 to 1.12.
BZIP2 has been updated from 1.0.3 to 1.0.4. [MERGED]
GNU Diffutils has been updated from 2.7 to 2.8.7. [MERGED]
DRM has been updated to a snapshot from DRI CVS as of 20060517. [MERGED]
The Forth Inspired Command Language (FICL) used in the boot loader has been updated to 3.03.
FILE has been updated from 4.12 to 4.23.
GCC has been updated from 3.4.6 to 4.2.1.
GNU Readline library has been updated from 5.0 to 5.2 patch 2. [MERGED]
The GNU version of gzip has been replaced with a modified version of gzip ported from NetBSD. [MERGED]
IPFilter has been updated from 4.1.13 to 4.1.28. [MERGED]
less has been updated from v394 to v416. [MERGED]
libpcap has been updated from 0.9.4 to 0.9.8.
netcat has been updated from the version included in OpenBSD 3.9 to the version included in OpenBSD 4.1. [MERGED]
OpenSSL has been updated from 0.9.7e to 0.9.8e.
ncurses has been updated from 5.2-20020615 to 5.6-20061217. ncurses now also has wide character support. [MERGED]
hostapd has been updated from version 0.3.9 to version 0.5.8.
PF has been updated from OpenBSD version 3.7 to OpenBSD version 4.1. This update includes a number of functional enhancements. Two notable changes are that keep state is now the default behavior for rules in pf.conf(5) and that flags S/SA is now the default flags setting for TCP rules. The options no state and flags any can be used to disable stateful filtering or TCP flags checking, respectively.
sendmail has been updated from 8.13.8 to 8.14.2. [MERGED]
tcpdump has been updated from 3.9.4 to 3.9.8.
The timezone database has been updated from the tzdata2006g release to the tzdata2007k release. [MERGED]
tip has been updated to a snapshot from OpenBSD as of 20060831.
TrustedBSD OpenBSM, has been updated from version 1.0 alpha 12 to version 1.0.
WPA Supplicant has been updated from version 0.3.9 to version 0.5.8.
The default partition sizing algorithm of the sysinstall(8) utility has been changed.
On systems where the disk capacity is larger than (3 * RAMsize + 10GB), the default sizes will now be as follows:
On systems where the disk capacity is larger than (RAMsize / 8 + 2 GB), the default sizes will be in the following ranges, with space allocated proportionally:
On systems with even less disk space, the existing behavior is not changed.
A new showconfig target has been added in src/Makefile to show the build configuration of the FreeBSD source tree.
The src.conf file, which contains settings that will apply to every build involving the FreeBSD source tree, has been added. For details, see build(7) and src.conf(5).
The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment (x11/gnome2) has been updated from 2.16.1 to 2.20.1. [MERGED]
The supported version of the KDE desktop environment (x11/kde3) has been updated from 3.5.4 to 3.5.7. [MERGED]
The supported version of the Xorg windowing system (x11/xorg) has been updated from 6.9.0 to 7.3.0. [MERGED]
The default value of X11BASE has been changed from /usr/X11R6 to /usr/local, the default
value of LOCALBASE. [MERGED]
The ISO images for FreeBSD are now sized for 700MB CDROM media. For most prior versions of FreeBSD, they assumed 650MB CDROM media. [MERGED]
Documentation of existing functionality has been improved by the addition of the following manual pages: acpi_sony(4), device_get_sysctl(9), ext2fs(5), mca(8), nanobsd(8), snd_mss(4), snd_t4dwave(4), sysctl(9).
Initial support for kernel subsystem API documentation generating framework using devel/doxygen has been added into src/sys/doc/subsys. To generate the API document, type make doxygen in src/ directory.
[i386, amd64] Beginning with FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE, binary upgrades between RELEASE versions (and snapshots of the various security branches) are supported using the freebsd-update(8) utility. The binary upgrade procedure will update unmodified userland utilities, as well as unmodified GENERIC or SMP kernels distributed as a part of an official FreeBSD release. The freebsd-update(8) utility requires that the host being upgraded have Internet connectivity.
An older form of binary upgrade is supported through the Upgrade option from the main sysinstall(8) menu on CDROM distribution media. This type of binary upgrade may be useful on non-i386, non-amd64 machines or on systems with no Internet connectivity.
Source-based upgrades (those based on recompiling the FreeBSD base system from source code) from previous versions are supported, according to the instructions in /usr/src/UPDATING.
Important: Upgrading FreeBSD should, of course, only be attempted after backing up all data and configuration files.
This file, and other release-related documents, can be downloaded from http://www.FreeBSD.org/snapshots/.
For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
All users of FreeBSD 7-STABLE should subscribe to the <current@FreeBSD.org> mailing list.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.