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FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE Release Notes

Release Highlights

The highlights in the 8.2-RELEASE are the following:

• [amd64] FreeBSD/amd64 now always sets the KVA space as equal to or larger than physical memory size. This change would help to prevent a “kmem_map too small” panic which often occurs when using ZFS.[r214620]

• The FreeBSD GENERIC kernel is now compiled with KDB and KDB_TRACE options. From 8.2-RELEASE the kernel supports displaying a stack trace on panic by using stack(9) facility with no debugger backend like ddb(8). Note that this does not change the default behaviors of the GENERIC kernel on panic.[r214326]

• The FreeBSD crypto(4) framework (opencrypto) now supports XTS-AES (XEX-TCB-CTS, or XEX-based Tweaked Code Book mode with CipherText Stealing), which is defined in IEEE Std. 1619-2007.[r214254]

• [amd64] Xen HVM support in FreeBSD/amd64 kernel has been improved. For more details, see xen(4) manual page.[r215788]

• FreeBSD now fully supports GPT (GUID Partition Table). Checksums of primary header and primary partition table are verified properly now.[r213994]

• [amd64, i386] The aesni(4) driver has been added. This supports AES accelerator on Intel CPUs and accelerates AES operations for crypto(4).[r215633]

• [amd64, i386] The aibs(4) driver has been added. This supports the hardware sensors in ASUS motherboards and replaces the acpi_aiboost(4) driver.[r210476]

• The tpm(4) driver, which supports Trusted Platform Module has been added.[r215036]

• The xhci(4) driver, which supports Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) and USB 3.0, has been added.[r215944]

• The FreeBSD Linux emulation subsystem now supports the video4linux API. This requires native video4linux hardware drivers such as the ones provided by multimedia/pwcbsd and multimedia/webcamd.

• The miibus(4) has been rewritten for the generic IEEE 802.3 annex 31B full duplex flow control support. The alc(4), bge(4), bce(4), cas(4), fxp(4), gem(4), jme(4), msk(4), nfe(4), re(4), stge(4), and xl(4) drivers along with atphy(4), bmtphy(4), brgphy(4), e1000phy(4), gentbi(4), inphy(4), ip1000phy(4), jmphy(4), nsgphy(4), nsphyter(4), and rgephy(4) have been updated to support flow control via this facility.[r211379, r215881, r215890, r2105894, r216002, r216023, r216029, r216031, r216033]

• A new netgraph(4) node ng_patch(4) has been added. This performs data modification of packets passing through. Modifications are restricted to a subset of C language operations on unsigned integers of 8, 16, 32 or 64-bit size.[r209843]

• The FreeBSD TCP reassembly implementation has been improved. A long-standing accounting bug affecting SMP systems has been fixed and the net.inet.tcp.reass.maxqlen sysctl(8) variable has been retired in favor of a per-connection dynamic limit based on the receive socket buffer size. FreeBSD receivers now handle packet loss (particularly losses caused by queue overflows) significantly better than before which improves connection throughput.[r214865, r214866]

• The siftr(4), Statistical Information For TCP Research (SIFTR) kernel module has been added. This is a facility that logs a range of statistics on active TCP connections to a log file. It provides the ability to make highly granular measurements of TCP connection state, aimed at system administrators, developers and researchers.[r214859]

• The geli(8) GEOM class now uses XTS-AES mode by default.[r214405]

• The ZFS on-disk format has been updated to version 15 and various performance improvements for the ZFS have been imported from OpenSolaris.

• Userland support for the dtrace(1) subsystem has been added. This allows inspection of userland software itself and its correlation with the kernel, thus allowing a much better picture of what exactly is going on behind the scenes. The dtruss(1) utility has been added and libproc has been updated to support the facility.[r214983]

• The gpart(8) utility now supports a recover subcommand for GPT partition tables.

• The gpart(8) utility now supports GPT_ENT_ATTR_BOOTME, GPT_ENT_ATTR_BOOTONCE, and GPT_ENT_ATTR_BOOTFAILED attributes in GPT. The attribute keywords in the command line are bootme, bootonce, and bootfailed respectively.[r213994]

• The libarchive library and tar(1) utility now support LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain-Algorithm) compression format.[r213667]

• The newsyslog(8) utility now supports an -S pidfile option to override the default syslogd(8) PID file.[r211699]

• The newsyslog(8) utility now supports a special log file name <include> for processing file inclusion. Globbing in the file name and circular dependency detection are supported. For more details, see the newsyslog.conf(5) manual page.[r215622]

• The pmcstat(8) utility now supports a file and a network socket as a top source. This allows top monitoring over TCP on a system with no local symbols, for example.[r211098]

• The tftp(1) and tftpd(8) utilities have been improved for better interoperability and they now support RFC 1350, 2347, 2348, 2349, and 3617.[r213036, r213038]

• A periodic script for zfs scrub has been added. For more details, see the periodic.conf(5) manual page.

• A periodic script which can be used to find installed ports' files with mismatched checksum has been added. For more details, see the periodic.conf(5) manual page.

• The sysinstall(8) utility now uses the following numbers for default and minimum partition sizes: 1GB for /, 4GB for /var, and 1GB for /tmp.[r211007]

• The ACPI-CA has been updated to 20101013.

• The ee(1) program has been updated to version 1.5.2.[r214287]

• ISC BIND has been updated to version 9.6-ESV-R3.

• netcat has been updated to version 4.8.

• OpenSSL has been updated to version 0.9.8q.

• The timezone database has been updated to the tzdata2010o release.

• The xz has been updated from snapshot as of 12 April 2010 to 5.0.0 release

• The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment (x11/gnome2) has been updated to 2.32.1.

• The supported version of the KDE desktop environment (x11/kde4) has been updated to 4.5.5.

For more details, please see the Detailed Release Notes.

A list of all platforms currently under development can be found on the Supported Platforms page.