FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT Release Notes

The FreeBSD Project

$FreeBSD: src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/relnotes/article.sgml,v 1.1068 2007/10/08 16:17:41 delphij Exp $

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The release notes for FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 7-CURRENT 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.


Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 What's New
2.1 Security Advisories
2.2 Kernel Changes
2.2.1 Boot Loader Changes
2.2.2 Hardware Support
2.2.3 Network Protocols
2.2.4 Disks and Storage
2.2.5 File Systems
2.3 Userland Changes
2.3.1 /etc/rc.d Scripts
2.4 Contributed Software
2.5 Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure
2.6 Release Engineering and Integration
2.7 Documentation
3 Upgrading from previous releases of FreeBSD

1 Introduction

This document contains the release notes for FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT. It describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of FreeBSD. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of FreeBSD.

The snapshot distribution to which these release notes apply represents the latest point along the 7-CURRENT development branch since 7-CURRENT was created. Information regarding pre-built, binary snapshot distributions along this branch can be found at http://www.FreeBSD.org/snapshots/.

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-CURRENT can be found on the FreeBSD Web site.


2 What's New

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-CURRENT 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.


2.1 Security Advisories

A temporary file vulnerability in texindex(1), which could allow a local attacker to overwrite files in the context of a user running the texindex(1) utility, has been fixed. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:01.texindex. [MERGED]

A temporary file vulnerability in the ee(1) text editor, which could allow a local attacker to overwrite files in the context of a user running ee(1), has been fixed. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:02.ee. [MERGED]

Several vulnerabilities in the cpio(1) utility have been corrected. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:03.cpio. [MERGED]

An error in ipfw(4) IP fragment handling, which could cause a crash, has been fixed. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:04.ipfw. [MERGED]

A potential buffer overflow in the IEEE 802.11 scanning code has been corrected. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:05.80211. [MERGED]

Two instances in which portions of kernel memory could be disclosed to users have been fixed. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:06.kmem. [MERGED]

A logic bug in the IP fragment handling in pf(4), which could cause a crash under certain circumstances, has been fixed. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:07.pf. [MERGED]

A logic bug in the NFS server code, which could cause a crash when the server received a message with a zero-length payload, has been fixed. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:10.nfs. [MERGED]

A programming error in the fast_ipsec(4) implementation results in the sequence number associated with a Security Association not being updated, allowing packets to unconditionally pass sequence number verification checks, has been fixed. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:11.ipsec. [MERGED]

A logic bug that could cause opiepasswd(1) to allow an unprivileged user to configure OPIE authentication for the root user under certain circumstances, has been fixed. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:12.opie. [MERGED]

An asynchronous signal handling vulnerability in sendmail(8), which could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running sendmail, typically root, has been fixed. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:13.sendmail. [MERGED]

[amd64, i386] An information disclosure issue found in the FreeBSD kernel running on 7th- and 8th-generation AMD processors has been fixed. For more details see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:14.fpu. [MERGED]

A bug in ypserv(8), which effectively disabled the /var/yp/securenets access control mechanism, has been corrected. More details are available in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:15.ypserv. [MERGED]

A bug in the smbfs file system, which could allow an attacker to escape out of chroot(2) environments on an smbfs mounted file system, has been fixed. For more details, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:16.smbfs. [MERGED]

A potential denial of service problem in sendmail(8) caused by excessive recursion which leads to stack exhaustion when attempting delivery of a malformed MIME message, has been fixed. For more details, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:17.sendmail. [MERGED]

A potential buffer overflow condition in sppp(4) has been corrected. For more details, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:18.ppp. [MERGED]

An OpenSSL bug related to validation of PKCS#1 v1.5 signatures has been fixed. For more details, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:19.openssl. [MERGED]

A potential denial of service attack against named(8) has been fixed. For more details, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:20.bind. [MERGED]

Several programming errors have been fixed in gzip(1). They could have the effect of causing a crash or an infinite loop when decompressing files. More information can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:21.gzip. [MERGED]

Several vulnerabilities have been fixed in OpenSSH. More details can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:22.openssh. [MERGED]

Multiple errors in the OpenSSL crypto(3) library have been fixed. Potential effects are varied, and are documented in more detail in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:23.openssl. [MERGED]

A bug that could permit corrupt archives to cause an infinite loop in libarchive(3) and tar(1) has been fixed. More details are available in FreeBSD-SA-06:24.libarchive. [MERGED]

A bug that could allow users in the operator group to read parts of kernel memory has been corrected. For more details, consult security advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:25.kmem. [MERGED]

A bug in the jail startup script that could permit privilege escalation via a symlink attack has been fixed. More information is available in FreeBSD-SA-07:01.jail. [MERGED]

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]


2.2 Kernel Changes

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.

Security event auditing is now supported in the FreeBSD kernel, and is enabled by the AUDIT kernel configuration option. The option is enabled in the GENERIC kernel. More information can be found in the audit(4) manual page.

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 lock command. If the argument has a valid lock class, this displays various information about the lock and calls a new function pointer in lock_class (lc_ddb_show) to dump class-specific information about the lock as well (such as the owner of a mutex or xlock'ed sx lock). [MERGED]

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.

DEFAULTS kernel configuration files for each platform have been added. These files contain directives that are implicitly included in all kernel configurations, and generally include basic, mandatory functionality for each platform. [MERGED]

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 firmware(9) subsystem has been added. This subsystem provides a mechanism to load binary data into the kernel via a specially crafted module. [MERGED]

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.

The random(4) entropy device driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

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.

[amd64, i386] Instead of including all of physical memory in a kernel crash dump, the kernel now defaults to dumping only pages that are actively mapped into kernel virtual memory. A new debug.minidump sysctl variable can be used to turn off this behavior when set to zero. [MERGED]

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 sysctl variable security.mac.biba.interfaces_equal which makes all network interfaces be created with the label biba/equal(equal-equal), has been added. This is useful where programs such as dhclient(8) and ppp(8). which initialize network interfaces do not have any labeling support. This variable is set as 0 (disabled) by default. [MERGED]

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.

FreeBSD now runs on the Xbox, whose architecture is nearly identical to the i386. For details of the latest development, see http://www.FreeBSD.org/platforms/xbox.html. [MERGED]

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.


2.2.1 Boot Loader Changes

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] A new loader tunable comconsole_speed to change the serial console speed has been added. If the previous stage boot loader requested a serial console, then the default speed is determined from the current serial port speed. Otherwise it is set to 9600 or the value of the BOOT_COMCONSOLE_SPEED kernel option. [MERGED]

[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] A bootable CDROM loader has been implemented for the pc98 platform. [MERGED]

[pc98] The IPLware support in boot0.5 has been enhanced to support version 3.33.

[i386] A bug in the i386 boot loader, which could cause file system corruption if a nextboot.conf file was used and landed after cylinder 1023, has been fixed. [MERGED]


2.2.2 Hardware Support

The amdsmb(4) driver has been added. It provides support for the AMD-8111 SMBus 2.0 controller. [MERGED]

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 passive cooling. [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, pc98] The ce(4) driver, which supports Cronyx Tau-PCI/32 adapters, has been added. [MERGED]

[i386, amd64] The coretemp(4) driver has been added to provide temperature readings on Intel® Core™ processors.

The est cpufreq(4) driver now supports frequency control for the VIA C7-M family of processors.

Support for the PadLock Security Co-processor in VIA C3, Eden, and C7 processors has been added to the crypto(9) subsystem. More information can be found in the padlock(4) manual page. [MERGED]

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]

[amd64, i386] ipmi(4), an OpenIPMI compatible driver, has been added. OpenIPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) is an open standard designed to enable remote monitoring and control of server, networking and telecommunication platforms. [MERGED]

The kbdmux(4) driver has been integrated into syscons(4) and the kbd device driver. By default syscons(4) will look for the kbdmux(4) keyboard first, and then, if not found, look for any keyboard. Switching to kbdmux(4) can be done at boot time by loading the kbdmux kernel module via loader(8), or at runtime via kldload(8) and releasing the active keyboard. [MERGED]

[amd64, i386] The kbdmux(4) driver is now included in the GENERIC kernel by default. Also, the “Boot FreeBSD with USB keyboard” menu item in the boot loader menu has been removed since this fixes USB keyboard probing problems. [MERGED]

The nfsmb(4) driver, which supports the NVIDIA nForce 2/3/4 SMBus 2.0 controller, has been added. [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.

[i386] Support has been improved for so-called “legacy-free” hardware, in particular, i386 systems without AT-style keyboard controllers such as the Macbook Pro. [MERGED]


2.2.2.1 Multimedia Support

The agp(4) driver now supports ATI AGP chipsets. [MERGED]

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 sound(4) driver now supports wider range sampling rate, multiple precisions choice, and 24/32 bit PCM format conversion. [MERGED]

The snd_als4000(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

The snd_atiixp(4) driver has been added. This supports ATI IXP 200/300/400 series audio controllers. [MERGED]

The snd_atiixp(4) driver now supports suspend and resume features. [MERGED]

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.

The snd_envy24ht(4) driver has been added to support the VIA Envy24HT series of audio chips.

The snd_es137x(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

The snd_ich(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [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.

The snd_solo(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

The snd_spicds(4) driver has been added to support I2S SPI audio codec chips.

The snd_via8233(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

The snd_via82c686(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

[amd64] The speaker(4) driver now supports FreeBSD/amd64. [MERGED]

The uaudio(4) driver now supports 24/32 bit audio formats and conversion.


2.2.2.2 Network Interface Support

The ath(4) driver has been updated to HAL version 0.9.20.3. [MERGED]

[amd64, i386, pc98, sparc64] The ath(4), ath_hal(4), and ath_rate_sample drivers have been included in the GENERIC kernel by default. [MERGED]

The axe(4) driver now supports altq(4). [MERGED]

[amd64, i386] The bce(4) driver, which supports Broadcom NetXtreme II (BCM5706/BCM5708) PCI/PCIe Gigabit Ethernet controllers, has been added. For more details, see bce(4). [MERGED]

A bug which prevents the bfe(4) driver from working on a system with over 1GB RAM has been fixed. [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 bge(4) driver now supports polling(4) mode. [MERGED]

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.

The dc(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

The de(4) driver has been converted to the bus_dma(9) API and is now MPSAFE.

The ed(4) driver is now MPSAFE.

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 now supports big-endian architectures such as sparc64. [MERGED]

The em(4) driver has been updated to version 6.5.0 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. [MERGED]

The iwi(4) driver now supports big-endian architectures such as sparc64.

A number of improvements and bugfixes have been made to the functionality of the iwi(4) driver. [MERGED]

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. [MERGED]

The ixgbe driver, which supports the Intel 10G PCI-Express adapter (82598), has been added.

The le(4) driver, which supports AMD Am7900 LANCE and Am79C9xx PCnet NICs, has been added. While the lnc(4) driver also supports these NICs, this driver has several advantages over it such as MPSAFE, ALTQ, VLAN_MTU, ifmedia, and 32-bit DMA for PCI variants. This driver is based on NetBSD's implementation. [MERGED]

The lge(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

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]

The my(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

The my(4) driver now supports altq(4). [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 nve(4) driver has been updated to version 1.0-0310 (23-Nov-2005). It also now has altq(4) support. [MERGED]

The nxge(4) driver, which supports the Neterion Xframe 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter, has been added.

The pcn(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

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 sf(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

The sk(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

The ste(4) driver is now MPSAFE. [MERGED]

The stge(4) driver has been added. It supports the Sundance/Tamarack TC9021 Gigabit Ethernet controller and was ported from NetBSD. [MERGED]

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 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.


2.2.3 Network Protocols

The arp(4) retransmission algorithm has been rewritten so that ARP requests are retransmitted without suppression, while there is demand for such ARP entry. Due to this change, a sysctl variable net.link.ether.inet.host_down_time has been removed. [MERGED]

The arp(4) protocol now supports a sysctl variable net.link.ether.inet.log_arp_permanent_modify to suppress logging of attempts to modify permanent ARP entries. [MERGED]

[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.

Multiple copies of a packet received via different bpf(4) listeners now all have identical timestamps. [MERGED]

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 enc(4) IPsec filtering pseudo-device has been added. It allows firewall packages using the pfil(9) framework to examine (and filter) IPsec traffic before outbound encryption and after inbound decryption. [MERGED]

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 creating SPAN ports, which transmit a copy of every frame received by the bridge. This feature can be enabled by using ifconfig(8). [MERGED]

The if_bridge(4) driver now supports RFC 3378 EtherIP. This change makes it possible to add gif(4) interfaces to bridges, which will then send and receive IP protocol 97 packets. Packets are Ethernet frames with an EtherIP header prepended. [MERGED]

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.

The path MTU discovery for multicast packets in the FreeBSD IPv6 stack has been disabled by default. Path MTU notification from a large number of multicast routers can be a kind of distributed Denial-of-Service attack to a router. This feature can be re-enabled by using a new sysctl variable net.inet6.ip6.mcast_pmtu. [MERGED]

IPv6 multicast forwarding is now dynamically loadable, via the ip_mroute.ko module.

IPv6 link-local addresses are now enabled only if ipv6_enable is set in rc.conf(5). [MERGED]

The ipfw(4) IP packet filter now supports IPv6. [MERGED]

The ipfw(4) firewall system now supports a tablearg feature, which allows values obtained from a table lookup to be used as part of a rule. [MERGED] This feature can be used to optimize some rulesets or to implement policy-based routing inside a firewall. For example, the following rules will throw different packets to different pipes:

pipe 1000 config bw 1000Kbyte/s
pipe 4000 config bw 4000Kbyte/s
table 1 add x.x.x.x 1000
table 1 add x.x.x.y 4000
pipe tablearg ip from table(1) to any

The ipfw(4) packet filter now supports tag and untag rule keywords. When a packet matches a rule with the tag keyword, the numeric tag for the given number in the range from 0 to 65535 will be attached to the packet. The tag acts as an internal marker (it is not sent out over the wire) that can be used to identify these packets later on, for example, by using tagged rule option. For more details, see ipfw(8). [MERGED]

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 IPFIREWALL_FORWARD_EXTENDED kernel option has been removed. This option was used to permit ipfw(4) to redirect packets with local destinations. This behavior is now always enabled when the IPFIREWALL_FORWARD kernel option is enabled. [MERGED]

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_ether(4) Netgraph node no longer overwrites the MAC address of outgoing frames by default. [MERGED]

The ng_h4(4) Netgraph node is now MPSAFE.

The ng_iface(4) Netgraph node now supports altq(4). [MERGED]

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 ng_tag(4) Netgraph node has been added to support the manipulation of mbuf tags attached to data in the kernel. [MERGED]

A bug has been fixed in which NFS over TCP would not reconnect when the server sent a FIN. This problem had occurred with Solaris NFS servers. [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.

The sysctl variables net.inet.ip.portrange.reservedhigh and net.inet.ip.portrange.reservedlow can be used with IPv6 now. [MERGED]

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 TCP bandwidth-delay product limiting feature has been disabled when the RTT is below a certain threshold. This optimization does not make sense on a LAN, as it has trouble figuring out the maximal bandwidth due to the coarse tick granularity. A new sysctl variable net.inet.tcp.inflight.rttthresh specifies the threshold in milliseconds below which this feature will disengage. It defaults to 10ms. [MERGED]

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]

Support for kqueue(2) operations has been added to the tun(4) driver. [MERGED]


2.2.4 Disks and Storage

The aac(4) driver now supports the Adaptec 2610SA SATA-RAID controller in some Hewlett-Packard machines.

The performance of the amr(4) driver has been improved; it also now supports full 64-bit DMA. While this feature is enabled by default, this can be forced off by setting the hw.amr.force_sg32 loader tunable for debugging purpose. [MERGED]

The amr(4) driver now supports the ioctl(2) requests necessary for the Linux LSI MegaRaid tools in FreeBSD's Linux emulation environment. [MERGED]

The arcmsr(4) driver has been updated to version 1.20.00.13. [MERGED]

The ahc(4) driver is now MPSAFE.

The ahd(4) driver is now MPSAFE.

The ata(4) driver now supports a workaround for some controllers whose DMA does not work properly in 48bit mode. For affected controllers, PIO mode will be used for access to areas beyond 137GB. [MERGED]

The ata(4) driver now supports the ITE IT8211F IDE controller, and the Promise PDC40718 and PDC40719 chip found in Promise Fasttrak TX4300. [MERGED]

The ata(4) driver now supports DMA for kernel crash dumps, as well as crash dumping to an ataraid(4) device. [MERGED]

The ata(4) driver now supports USB mass storage class devices. To enable it, a line device atausb in the kernel configuration file or loading the atausb kernel module is needed. Note that this functionality cannot coexist with the umass(4) driver. [MERGED]

The ataraid(4) driver now supports JMicron ATA RAID metadata. [MERGED]

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.

The GEOM_LABEL class now supports Ext2FS, NTFS, and ReiserFS. [MERGED]

The GEOM_MIRROR class now supports kernel crash dumps to the GEOM providers. [MERGED]

The GEOM_MIRROR and GEOM_RAID3 classes now support sysctl variables kern.geom.mirror.disconnect_on_failure and kern.geom.graid3.disconnect_on_failure to control whether failed components will be disconnected or not. The default value is 1 to preserve the current behavior, and if it is set to 0 such components are not disconnected and the kernel will try to still use them (only the first error will be logged). This is helpful for the case of multiple broken components (in different places), so actually all data is available. The broken components will be visible in gmirror list or graid3 list output with flag BROKEN. [MERGED]

The GEOM_MIRROR and GEOM_RAID3 classes now use parallel I/O requests for synchronization to improve the performance. New sysctl variables kern.geom.mirror.sync_requests and kern.geom.raid3.sync_requests define how many parallel I/O requests should be used. Also, the sysctl variables kern.geom.mirror.reqs_per_sync, kern.geom.mirror.syncs_per_sec, kern.geom.raid3.reqs_per_sync, and kern.geom.raid3.syncs_per_sec are deprecated and have been removed. [MERGED]

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).

A new GEOM class GEOM_ZERO has been added. It creates a very huge provider (41PB) /dev/gzero and is mainly useful for performance testing. On BIO_READ request it zero-fills bio_data and on BIO_WRITE it does nothing. [MERGED]

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 series of controllers.

[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 mfi(4) driver, which supports the LSI MegaRAID SAS controller family, has been added. [MERGED]

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.

[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 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]

A new GEOM-based disk encryption facility, GEOM_ELI, has been added. It uses the crypto(9) framework for hardware acceleration and supports different cryptographic algorithms. See geli(8) for more information. [MERGED]

The geli(8) disk encryption system now supports loading keyfiles before the root file system is mounted. [MERGED] For example, the following entries can be used in /boot/loader.conf to enable it:

geli_da0_keyfile0_load="YES"
geli_da0_keyfile0_type="da0:geli_keyfile0"
geli_da0_keyfile0_name="/boot/keys/da0.key0"
geli_da0_keyfile1_load="YES"
geli_da0_keyfile1_type="da0:geli_keyfile1"
geli_da0_keyfile1_name="/boot/keys/da0.key1"
geli_da0_keyfile2_load="YES"
geli_da0_keyfile2_type="da0:geli_keyfile2"
geli_da0_keyfile2_name="/boot/keys/da0.key2"

geli_da1s3a_keyfile0_load="YES"
geli_da1s3a_keyfile0_type="da1s3a:geli_keyfile0"
geli_da1s3a_keyfile0_name="/boot/keys/da1s3a.key"

geli(8) is now able to perform data integrity verification (data authentication) of encrypted data stored on disk. Note that the encryption algorithm is now specified to the geli(8) control program using the -e option; the -a option is now used to specify the authentication algorithm. [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.


2.2.5 File Systems

[amd64, i386, pc98] The linsysfs(5) pseudo-file system driver has been added. It provides a subset of the Linux sys file system, and is required for the correct operation of some Linux binaries (such as the LSI MegaRAID SAS utility). [MERGED]

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.

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.


2.3 Userland Changes

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 asf(8) utility has been revised and extended. Now it can operate via several interfaces including kvm(3), which supports not only live systems, but also kernel crash dumps. [MERGED]

The arp(8) utility now allows the -i option together with the -d and -a options to allow all entries for a given interface to be removed. [MERGED]

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 OpenBSM userland tools, including audit(8), auditd(8), auditreduce(1), and praudit(1), have been added. [MERGED]

The bsdiff(1) and bspatch(1) utilities have been added. These are tools for constructing and applying binary patches. [MERGED]

The bsnmpd(1) utility now supports the Host Resources MIB described in RFC 2790. [MERGED]

The camcontrol(8) utility now supports a readcap command to display the size of devices. [MERGED]

The cmp(1) utility now supports an -h flag to compare the symbolic link itself rather than the file that the link points to. [MERGED]

The config(8) utility now supports the nocpu directive, which cancels the effect of a previous cpu directive. [MERGED]

The config(8) utility now reads DEFAULTS kernel configuration file if it exists in the current directory before the specified configuration file. [MERGED]

The cp(1) utility now supports a -l option, which causes it to create hardlinks to the source files instead of copying them. [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 csh(1) utility now supports NLS catalogs. Note that this requires installing the shells/tcsh_nls port. [MERGED]

The csup(1) utility has been imported. This is an implementation of a CVSup-compatible client written in the C language. Note that it currently supports checkout mode only. [MERGED]

The dhclient(8) program now supports the Classless Static Route option as described in RFC 3442.

The dhclient(8) program now sends the host's name in DHCP requests if it is not specified in the configuration file. [MERGED]

The devd(8) utility now supports a -f option to specify a configuration file. [MERGED]

The du(1) program now supports a -n flag, which causes it to ignore files and directories with the nodump flag set. [MERGED]

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.

The fsdb(8) utility now supports changing the birth time of files on UFS2 file systems using the new btime command. [MERGED]

The fsdb(8) program now supports a findblk command, which finds the inode(s) owning a specific disk block. [MERGED]

The find(1) program now supports -Btime and other related primaries, which can be used to create expressions based on a file's creation time. [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) utility, a tool for managing binary updates to the FreeBSD base system, has been added. [MERGED]

The ftpd(8) utility now creates a PID file /var/run/ftpd.pid even when no -p option is specified. [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 getfacl(1) utility now supports a -q flag to suppress the per-file header comment listing the file name, owner, and group. [MERGED]

The getent(1) utility has been imported from NetBSD. It retrieves and displays information from an administrative database (such as hosts) using the lookup order specified in nsswitch.conf(5). [MERGED]

The gpt(8) utility now supports setting GPT partition labels.

The gvinum(8) utility now supports commands to rename objects and to move a subdisk from one drive to another. [MERGED]

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 the 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 id(1) utility now supports a -A flag to print process audit properties, including the audit user id. [MERGED]

The ifconfig(8) utility now supports a -k flag to allow printing potentially sensitive keying material to standard output. This sensitive information will not be printed by default. [MERGED]

The ifconfig(8) utility now supports a -tunnel parameter, which is just an alias for deletetunnel, yet is more convenient and easier to type. [MERGED]

The -vlandev parameter to ifconfig(8) no longer requires a network interface as its argument. The argument still is supported for backward compatibility, but is now deprecated and its use is discouraged. [MERGED]

The iostat(8) utility now supports a -x flag (inspired by Solaris) to print extended disk statistics. If the new -z flag is also specified, no output is made for disks with no activity. [MERGED]

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.

The jail(8) utility supports a -J jid_file option to write out a JidFile, similar to a PidFile, containing the jailid, path, hostname, IP and the command used to start the jail. [MERGED]

The jail(8) program now supports a -s option to specify a jail's securelevel. [MERGED]

The jexec(8) utility now supports -u and -U flags to specify username credentials under which a command should be executed. [MERGED]

The kdump(1) program now supports a -H flag, which causes kdump to print an additional field holding the threadid. [MERGED]

The kdump(1) program now supports a -s flag to suppress the display of I/O data. [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.

The libmemstat(3) library has been added. This is for use by debugging and monitoring applications in tracking kernel memory statistics. It provides an abstracted interface to uma(9) and malloc(9) statistics, wrapped around the binary stream sysctl variables for the allocators. [MERGED]

The ln(1) utility now supports an -F flag, which deletes existing empty directories when creating symbolic links. [MERGED]

The locate(1) utility now supports a -0 flag to make this utility interoperable with xargs(1)'s -0 flag. [MERGED]

The logger(1) utility now supports a -P, which specifies the port to which syslog messages should be sent. [MERGED]

The ls(1) utility now supports an -I flag to disable the automatic -A flag for the superuser. [MERGED]

The ls(1) utility now supports an -U flag to use the file creation time for sorting. [MERGED]

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 mergemaster(8) utility now supports an -A option to explicitly specify an architecture to pass through to the underlying makefiles. [MERGED]

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.

The mount(8) utility now supports a late keyword in fstab(5), along with a corresponding -l command-line option to specify that these “late” file systems should be mounted. [MERGED]

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 moused(8) daemon now supports an -H flag to enable horizontal virtual scrolling similar to the -V flag for vertical virtual scrolling. [MERGED]

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 an -h flag for interface stats mode, which prints all interface statistics in human readable form. [MERGED]

The netstat(1) utility now supports printing ipsec(4) protocol statistics. Note that the output of netstat -s -p ipsec differs depending on which stack is compiled into the kernel since they each keep different statistics. [MERGED]

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 periodic(8) daily script now supports display of the status of gmirror(8), graid3(8), gstripe(8), and gconcat(8) devices. Note that these are disabled by default. [MERGED]

A new function, pidfile(3), which provides reliable pidfiles handling, has been implemented in libutil. [MERGED]

The ping(8) utility now supports a “sweeping ping” in which icmp(4) payload of packets being sent is increased with given step. This is useful for testing problematic channels, MTU issues or traffic policing functions in networks. [MERGED]

The ping(8) command now supports a -W option to specify the maximum time to wait for an echo reply. [MERGED]

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 pkill(1) utility (also known as pgrep(1)) has been moved from /usr/bin to /bin so that it can be used by startup scripts. Symbolic links from its former location have been created for backward compatibility. [MERGED]

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.

An extensible implementation of printf(3), compatible with GLIBC, has been added to libc. It is only used if the environment variable USE_XPRINTF is defined, one of the extension functions is called, or the global variable __use_xprintf is set to a value greater than 0. Five extensions are currently supported: %H (hex dump), %T (time_t and time-related structures), %M (errno message), %Q (double-quoted, escaped string), %V ( strvis(3)-format string), [MERGED]

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 rfcomm_sppd(1) program now supports service names in addition to -c option with channel number. The supported names are: DUN (Dial-Up Networking), FAX (Fax), LAN (LAN Access Using PPP), and SP (Serial Port). [MERGED]

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.

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 sh(1) utility now supports a times built-in command. [MERGED]

The snapinfo(8) utility, which shows snapshot locations on UFS file systems, has been added. [MERGED]

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 strtonum(3) library function has been implemented based on OpenBSD's implementation. This is an improved version of strtoll(3). [MERGED]

The sysctl(8) utility now supports a -q flag to suppress a limited set of warnings and errors.

The tail(1) utility now supports a -q flag to suppress header lines when multiple files are specified. [MERGED]

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 traceroute(8) program now supports a -D flag, which causes it to display the differences between the sent and received packets. [MERGED]

The traceroute(8) utility now supports a -e option, which sets a fixed destination port for probe packets. This can be useful for tracing behind packet-filtering firewalls. [MERGED]

traceroute(8) now decodes the complete set of ICMP unreachable messages in its output. [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 xargs(1) utility now supports a -r flag which makes the command execution when the standard input does not contain any non-whitespace-characters. [MERGED]

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 compiler toolchain is now capable of generating executables for systems using the ARM processor. [MERGED]


2.3.1 /etc/rc.d Scripts

The auditd script for OpenBSM auditd(8) has been added. [MERGED]

The bluetooth script has been added. This script will be called from devd(8) in response to device attachment/detachment events and to stop/start particular device without unplugging it by hand. The configuration parameters are in /etc/defaults/bluetooth.device.conf, and can be overridden by using /etc/bluetooth/$device.conf (where $device is ubt0, btcc0, and so on.) For more details, see bluetooth.conf(5). [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 hcsecd and sdpd scripts have been added for hcsecd(8) and sdpd(8) daemons. These daemons can run even if no Bluetooth devices are attached to the system, but both daemons depend on Bluetooth socket layer and thus disabled by default. Bluetooth sockets layer must be either loaded as a module or compiled into kernel before the daemons can run. [MERGED]

The hostapd script for hostapd(8) has been added. [MERGED]

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 netif script now supports ipv4_addrs_ifn variables, which add one or more IPv4 address from a ranged list in CIDR notation. [MERGED] For example:

ipv4_addrs_ed0="192.168.0.1/24 192.168.1.1-5/28"

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 ppp-user script has been renamed to ppp. [MERGED]

The sendmail script no longer rebuilds the aliases database if it is missing or older than the aliases file. 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.


2.4 Contributed Software

Intel ACPI-CA has been updated to 20070320.

awk has been updated from the 24 April 2005 release to the 1 May 2007 release.

BIND has been updated from 9.3.1 to 9.4.1-p1.

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 4.21.

The GNU version of gzip has been replaced with a modified version of gzip ported from NetBSD. [MERGED]

netcat has been updated from the version in a 4 February 2005 OpenBSD snapshot to the version included in OpenBSD 4.1. [MERGED]

GCC has been updated from 3.4.4 to 4.2.1.

GNU Readline library has been updated from 5.0 to 5.2 patch 2. [MERGED]

GNU Troff has been updated from version 1.19 to version 1.19.2. [MERGED]

IPFilter has been updated from 4.1.8 to 4.1.23.

less has been updated from v381 to v408.

libpcap has been updated from 0.9.1 to 0.9.4. [MERGED]

lukemftpd has been updated from a snapshot from NetBSD as of 9 August 2004 to a snapshot from NetBSD as of 31 August 2006. [MERGED]

OpenSSH has been updated from 4.2p1 to 4.5p1. [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.

sendmail has been updated from 8.13.4 to 8.14.1. [MERGED]

tcpdump has been updated from 3.9.1 to 3.9.4. [MERGED]

The timezone database has been updated from the tzdata2005l release to the tzdata2007g release. [MERGED]

tip has been updated to a snapshot from OpenBSD as of 20060831.

TrustedBSD OpenBSM, version 1.0 alpha 15, an implementation of the documented Sun Basic Security Module (BSM) Audit API and file format, as well as local extensions to support the Mac OS X and FreeBSD operating systems has been added. This also includes command line tools for audit trail reduction and conversion to text and XML, as well as documentation of the commands, file format, and APIs. For this functionality, the AUDIT kernel option, /var/audit directory, and audit group have been added. [MERGED]

WPA Supplicant has been updated from version 0.3.9 to version 0.5.8.

zlib has been updated from version 1.2.2 to version 1.2.3. [MERGED]


2.5 Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure

pkg_add(1) now supports an -F flag to disable checking whether the same package is already installed or not. [MERGED]

The pkg_add(1) program now supports an -P flag, which is the same as the -p flag except that the given prefix is also used recursively for the dependency packages if any. [MERGED]

The pkg_add(1) and pkg_create(1) utilities now support a -K flag to save packages to the current directory (or PKGDIR if defined) by default. [MERGED]

The pkg_create(1) program now supports an -x flag to support basic regular expressions for package name, an -E flag for extended regular expressions, and a -G for exact matching. [MERGED]

The pkg_version(1) utility now supports an -o flag to show the origin recorded on package generation instead of the package name, and an -O flag to list packages with a specific registered origin. [MERGED]

The portsnap(8) utility (sysutils/portsnap) has been added into the FreeBSD base system. This is a secure, easy to use, fast, lightweight, and generally good way for users to keep their ports trees up to date. [MERGED]

A incorrect handling of HTTP_PROXY_AUTH in the portsnap(8) utility has been fixed. [MERGED]

The startup scripts from the local_startup directory now evaluated by using rcorder(8) with scripts in the base system. [MERGED]

The suffix of startup scripts from the Ports Collection has been removed. This means foo.sh is renamed to foo, and now scripts whose name is something like foo.ORG will also be invoked. You are recommended to reinstall packages which install such scripts and remove extra files in the local_startup directory. [MERGED]

New rc.conf variables, ldconfig_local_dirs and ldconfig_local32_dirs have been added. These hold lists of local ldconfig(8) directories. [MERGED]

The @cwd command in pkg-plist now allows the case where no directory argument is given. If no directory argument is given, it will set current working directory to the first prefix given by the @cwd command. [MERGED]


2.6 Release Engineering and Integration

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:

    Partition Size
    swap RAMsize * 2
    / 512 MB
    /tmp 512 MB
    /var 1024 MB + RAMsize
    /usr the rest (8GB or more)
  • 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:

    Partition Size
    swap from RAMsize / 8 to RAMsize * 2
    / from 256MB to 512MB
    /tmp from 128MB to 512MB
    /var from 128MB to 1024MB
    /usr from 1536MB to 8192MB
  • On systems with even less disk space, the existing behavior is not changed.

The sysinstall(8) utility now displays the running FreeBSD version in menu titles. [MERGED]

A new showconfig target has been added in src/Makefile to show the build configuration of the FreeBSD source tree.

A /media directory has been added to contain mount points for removable media such as CDROMs, floppy disks, USB drives, and so on. [MERGED]

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 2.10.2 to 2.18.0. As a part of this update, the default prefix for GNOME (and some related programs) has moved from /usr/X11R6 to /usr/local. [MERGED]

The supported version of the KDE desktop environment (x11/kde3) has been updated from 3.4.2 to 3.5.7. [MERGED]

[amd64, i386] The supported Linux emulation now uses the libraries in the emulators/linux_base-fc4 package. [MERGED]

The supported version of the Perl interpreter (lang/perl5.8) has been updated from 5.8.7 to 5.8.8. [MERGED]

The supported version of the Xorg windowing system (x11/xorg) has been updated from 6.8.2 to 7.2.0. [MERGED]

The default value of X11BASE has been changed from /usr/X11R6 to /usr/local, the default value of LOCALBASE. [MERGED]

[pc98] FreeBSD/pc98 release CDROMs are now bootable on systems with some supported SCSI adapters. [MERGED]


2.7 Documentation

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).

The manual pages for NTP have been updated to 4.2.0, to match the version of code actually included in FreeBSD. [MERGED]

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.


3 Upgrading from previous releases of FreeBSD

[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-CURRENT should subscribe to the <current@FreeBSD.org> mailing list.

For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.