FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE Errata

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1 Introduction

This errata document contains ``late-breaking news'' about FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE. Before installing this version, it is important to consult this document to learn about any post-release discoveries or problems that may already have been found and fixed.

Any version of this errata document actually distributed with the release (for example, on a CDROM distribution) will be out of date by definition, but other copies are kept updated on the Internet and should be consulted as the ``current errata'' for this release. These other copies of the errata are located at http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/, plus any sites which keep up-to-date mirrors of this location.

Source and binary snapshots of FreeBSD 5-STABLE also contain up-to-date copies of this document (as of the time of the snapshot).

For a list of all FreeBSD CERT security advisories, see http://www.FreeBSD.org/security/ or ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/.

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2 Security Advisories

No advisories.

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3 Open Issues

(31 Oct 2004) Sometimes the performance of the re(4) and em(4) drivers can become poor under heavy load. Especially, there are reports of em(4) on the IBM ThinkPad T40 locking up under such conditions.

(31 Oct 2004) There are reports of the sk(4) driver locking up under heavy load, especially when on-board NICs of ASUStek motherboards are used. To clear the condition, bringing the interface down then back up and/or rebooting the system are needed.

(31 Oct 2004) The burncd(8) utility is functional but may behave erratically on some systems. Reported symptoms include that burncd(8) can appear to hang up and never complete while the operation actually does complete, and the progress indicator does not show the correct value. Workarounds include:

• Eject and re-insert a media after burning a CD.

• Press Ctrl-C when burncd(8) appears to hang up in spite the access LED goes inactive.

(31 Oct 2004) When the user/group rule modificators in pf(4) and ipfw(4) are used, the loader tunable debug.mpsafenet must be set to 0 (this is 1 by default). For example, the following rules are affected:

for ipfw(4):

count ip from any to 192.168.2.1 uid root

for pf(4):

block log quick proto { tcp, udp } all user root

To set debug.mpsafenet to 0 on every boot, add the following line into /boot/loader.conf:

debug.mpsafenet=0

More specifically, the group and user filter parameters in pf(4), and the gid, jail, and uid rule options in ipfw(4) are relevant. If debug.mpsafenet is set to 1, the system can hang up when the rule is evaluated due to a lock order reversal with the socket layer. More details can be found in the ipfw(8) and pf.conf(5) manual pages.

(31 Oct 2004) The vinum(4) subsystem works fine on 5.3, but it can cause a system panic at boot time. As a workaround you can add vinum_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf.

As an alternative you can also use the new, geom(4)-based vinum(4) subsystem. To activate the geom(4)-aware vinum at boot time, add geom_vinum_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf.

While some sort of uncommon configurations such as multiple vinum drives in a disk are not supported, it is basically backward compatible. Note that for the geom(4)-aware vinum the new userland control program, gvinum should be used, and it still lacks some functionality.

(31 Oct 2004) The results of netstat -m can become incorrect on SMP systems when debug.mpsafenet is set to 1 (default). This is an error in the statistics gathering because of a race condition in the counters, not an actual memory leak.

(31 Oct 2004) When installing FreeBSD 5.3 onto a machine without PS/2 ports using an USB keyboard, the keyboard will stop working once the kernel boots. As a workaround, select ``Escape to loader prompt'' in the boot loader menu and enter the following lines at the prompt:

set hint.atkbd.0.flags="0x1"
boot

After the installation, add the following line into /boot/loader.conf:

hint.atkbd.0.flags="0x1"

(1 Nov 2004) The ULE scheduler described in the release note has been completely disabled to discourage its use because it has several stability problems.

(1 Nov 2004) Programs linked with libpthread may not report any CPU usage statistics according to top(1), while ones linked with libthr have the correct statistics.

(1 Nov 2004) When CMD649 or SiI0680 ATA controller is used, the ATA RAID support of ata(4) (ataraid) on 5.3 can corrupt the existing RAID configuration which was created on 5.2 or prior. The ATA RAID support for these controllers is non-functional for this release.

(3 Nov 2004) For FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/amd64, the SMP support in the GENERIC kernel has been disabled by default because the SMP kernel can degrade the performance on UP machines. A kernel configuration file SMP which can be used to enable the SMP support has been added. More details on building the custom kernel can be found in http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/kernelconfig.html.

(4 Nov 2004) The tar(1) (also known as bsdtar(1)) utility does not detect the end of a recording medium such as a tape and a floppy disk properly when it is specified in the -f option. As an alternative gtar(1) (GNU tar) can be used.

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4 Late-Breaking News

No news.