freebsd-dev/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/relnotes/common/new.sgml

<articleinfo>
  <title>&os;/&arch; &release.current; Release Notes</title>

  <corpauthor>The &os; Project</corpauthor>

  <pubdate>$FreeBSD$</pubdate>

  <copyright>
    <year>2000</year>
    <year>2001</year>
    <year>2002</year>
    <year>2003</year>
    <year>2004</year>
    <year>2005</year>
    <holder role="mailto:doc@FreeBSD.org">The &os; Documentation Project</holder>
  </copyright>

  <abstract>
    <para>The release notes for &os; &release.current; contain a summary
      of the changes made to the &os; base system since &release.branch; is created.
      This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since
      the last release, as well as significant changes to the &os;
      kernel and userland.
      Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.</para>
  </abstract>
</articleinfo>

<sect1 id="intro">
  <title>Introduction</title>

  <para>This document contains the release notes for &os;
    &release.current; on the &arch.print; hardware platform.  It
    describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of &os;.
    It also provides some notes on upgrading
    from previous versions of &os;.</para>

<![ %release.type.current [

  <para>The &release.type; distribution to which these release notes
    apply represents the latest point along the &release.branch; development
    branch since &release.branch; is created.  Some pre-built, binary
    &release.type; distributions along this branch
    can be found at <ulink url="&release.url;"></ulink>.</para>

]]>

<![ %release.type.snapshot [

  <para>The &release.type; distribution to which these release notes
    apply represents a point along the &release.branch; development
    branch between &release.prev; and the future &release.next;.  Some
    pre-built, binary &release.type; distributions along this branch
    can be found at <ulink url="&release.url;"></ulink>.</para>

]]>

<![ %release.type.release [

  <para>This distribution of &os; &release.current; is a
    &release.type; distribution.  It can be found at <ulink
    url="&release.url;"></ulink> or any of its mirrors.  More
    information on obtaining this (or other) &release.type;
    distributions of &os; can be found in the <ulink
    url="&url.books.handbook;/mirrors.html"><quote>Obtaining
    &os;</quote> appendix</ulink> to the <ulink
    url="&url.books.handbook;/">&os;
    Handbook</ulink>.</para>

]]>

  <para>All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before
    installing &os;.  The errata document is updated with
    <quote>late-breaking</quote> 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 &os;
    &release.current; can be found on the &os; Web site.</para>

</sect1>

<sect1 id="new">
  <title>What's New</title>

  <para>This section describes
    the most user-visible new or changed features in &os;
    since &release.prev;.
    In general, changes described here are unique to the &release.branch;
    branch unless specifically marked as &merged; features.
  </para>

  <para>Typical release note items
    document recent security advisories issued after
    &release.prev.historic;,
    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 &os; between releases; this document focuses
    primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major
    architectural improvements.</para>

  <sect2 id="security">
    <title>Security Advisories</title>

    <para></para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="kernel">
    <title>Kernel Changes</title>

    <para arch="i386">Support for 80386 processors (the
      <literal>I386_CPU</literal> kernel configuration option) has
      been removed.  Users running this class of CPU should use &os;
      5.<replaceable>X</replaceable> or earlier.</para>

    <para>The loader tunable <varname>debug.mpsafevm</varname> has been
      has been enabled by default.</para>

    <para>A number of bugs have been fixed in the ULE
      scheduler. &merged;</para>

    <para>Fine-grained locking to allow much of the VFS stack to run
      without the Giant lock has been added.  It is currently enabled
      by the loader tunable (and sysctl variable)
      <varname>debug.mpsafevfs</varname>, which currently defaults to
      <literal>0</literal> (disabled).</para>

    <!-- Above this line, sort kernel changes by manpage/keyword-->

    <sect3 id="boot">
      <title>Boot Loader Changes</title>

      <para arch="i386">A serial console-capable version of
	<filename>boot0</filename> has been added.  It can be written
	to a disk using &man.boot0cfg.8; and specifying
	<filename>/boot/boot0sio</filename> as the argument to the
	<option>-b</option> option.</para>

      <para arch="i386"><filename>cdboot</filename> now works around a
	BIOS problem observed on some systems when booting from USB
	CDROM drives.</para>

      <!-- Above this line, order boot loader changes by keyword-->

    </sect3>

    <sect3 id="proc">
      <title>Hardware Support</title>

      <para arch="i386,pc98">Support for the OLDCARD subsystem has
	been removed.  The NEWCARD system is now used for all PCCARD
	device support.</para>

      <sect4 id="mm">
	<title>Multimedia Support</title>

	<para></para>
      </sect4>

      <sect4 id="net-if">
	<title>Network Interface Support</title>

	<para>The &man.ath.4; driver has been updated to split the
	  transmit rate control algorithm into a separate module.
	  Either <literal>device ath_rate_onoe</literal> or
	  <literal>device ath_rate_amrr</literal> must be included in
	  the kernel configuration when using the &man.ath.4;
	  driver.</para>

	<para arch="amd64">The &man.ndis.4; device driver wrapper now
	  supports &windows;/x86-64 binaries on amd64
	  systems. &merged;</para>

	<para>The &man.sf.4; driver now has support for device polling
	  and &man.altq.4;. &merged;</para>

	<para>The &man.sk.4; driver now has support for &man.altq.4;.
	  This driver also now supports jumbo frames on Yukon-based
	  interfaces. &merged;</para>

	<para>Support for 802.11 devices in the &man.wlan.4; has been
	  greatly overhauled.  In addition to architectural changes,
	  it includes completed 802.11g, WPA, 802.11i, 802.1x,
	  WME/WMM, AP-side power-saving, and plugin frameworks for
	  cryptography modules, authenticators, and access control.
	  Note in particular that WEP now requires the
	  <filename>wlan_wep</filename> module to be loaded (or
	  compiled) into the kernel.</para>

      </sect4>
    </sect3>

    <sect3 id="net-proto">
      <title>Network Protocols</title>

      <para>Ongoing work is reducing the use of the Giant lock by the
	network protocol stack and improving the locking
	strategies.</para>

      <para>A bug in TCP that sometimes caused RST packets to
	be ignored if the receive window was zero bytes has been
	fixed. &merged;</para>

      <para>Several bugs in the TCP SACK implementation have been
	fixed. &merged;</para>

      <para>RFC 1644 T/TCP support has been removed.</para>

    </sect3>

    <sect3 id="disks">
      <title>Disks and Storage</title>

      <para>The &man.amr.4; driver is now safe for use on systems
	using &man.pae.4;. &merged;</para>

      <para>The &man.matcd.4; driver has been removed.</para>

      <para arch="pc98">The &man.wd.4; driver has been removed.  The
	&man.ata.4; driver has been found to work well enough on the
	pc98 platform that there is no need for the older &man.wd.4;
	driver.</para>

      <para>Information about newly-mounted cd9660 file systems (such
	as the presence of Rockridge extensions) is now only printed
	if the kernel was booted in verbose mode.  This change was
	made to reduce the amount of (generally unnecessary) kernel
	log messages.</para>

    </sect3>

    <sect3 id="fs">
      <title>File Systems</title>

      <para>The autofs(9) file system and the userland library
	&man.libautofs.3; have been added.</para>
    </sect3>

    <sect3>
      <title>Contributed Software</title>

      <para></para>
    </sect3>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="userland">
    <title>Userland Changes</title>

    <para>The &man.burncd.8; utility now allows commands (such as
      <command>eject</command>) to take place after fixating a
      disk.</para>

    <para>The <literal>create</literal> command of the &man.gpt.8;
      utility now supports a <option>-f</option> command-line flag to
      force creation of a GPT even when there is an MBR record on a
      disk. &merged;</para>

    <para>The &man.ifconfig.8; utility has been restructured.  It is
      now more modular and flexible with respect to supporting
      interface-specific functionality.  The 802.11 support has been
      updated to support recent changes to the 802.11 subsystem and
      drivers.</para>

    <para>The <literal>NO_NIS</literal> compile-time knob for userland
      has been added.  As its name implies, enabling this
      <filename>Makefile</filename> variable will cause NIS support to
      be excluded from various programs and will cause the NIS
      utilities to not be built. &merged;</para>

    <para arch="i386">The &man.mkuzip.8;, which is a non-GPL
      utility to compress file system images for use with
      <literal>GEOM_UZIP</literal> &man.geom.4; module,
      has been added.</para>

    <para>The &man.ncal.1; utility now supports a <option>-m</option>
      flag to generate a calendar for a specified month in the current
      year. &merged;</para>

    <para>The &man.mknod.8; utility has been marked deprecated.
      Device nodes have been managed by the &man.devfs.5; device file
      system since &os; 5.0.</para>

    <para>For years, &os; has used <filename>Makefile</filename>
      variables of the form
      <varname>NO<replaceable>FOO</replaceable></varname> and
      <varname>NO_<replaceable>FOO</replaceable></varname>.  For
      consistency, those variables using the former naming convention
      have been converted to the
      <varname>NO_<replaceable>FOO</replaceable></varname> form.  The
      file <filename>/usr/share/mk/bsd.compat.mk</filename> has a
      complete list of these variables; it also implements some
      temporary backward compatability for the old names.</para>

    <para>The &man.ppp.8; program now implements an
      <option>echo</option> parameter, which allows LCP ECHOs to be
      enabled independently of LQR reports.  Older versions of
      &man.ppp.8; would revert to LCP ECHO mode on negotiation
      failure.  It is now necessary to specify <command>enable
      echo</command> to get this behaviour. &merged;</para>

    <para>The &man.tcpdrop.8; command, which closes a selected TCP
      connection, has been added.  It was obtained from
      OpenBSD.</para>

    <para>&man.whois.1; now supports
      a <option>-k</option> flag
      for querying <hostid role="fqdn">whois.krnic.net</hostid>
      (the National Internet Development Agency of Korea)
      which hold details of IP address allocations within
      Korea. &merged;</para>

    <sect3 id="rc-scripts">
      <title><filename>/etc/rc.d</filename> Scripts</title>

      <para></para>
    </sect3>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="contrib">
    <title>Contributed Software</title>

    <para>The timezone database has been updated from the
      <application>tzdata2004e</application> release to the
      <application>tzdata2004g</application> release. &merged;</para>

    <para>A snapshot of <application>netcat</application> from OpenBSD
      as of 4 February 2005 has been added.  More information can be
      found in the &man.nc.1; manual page. &merged;</para>

    <para><application>OpenPAM</application> has been updated from the
      Eelgrass release to the Feterita release.</para>

    <para><application>OpenSSH</application> has been updated from 3.8p1
      to 3.9p1.</para>

    <para><application>sendmail</application> has been updated from
      version 8.13.1 to version 8.13.3. &merged;</para>

  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="ports">
    <title>Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure</title>

    <para></para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="releng">
    <title>Release Engineering and Integration</title>

    <para></para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="doc">
    <title>Documentation</title>

    <para></para>

  </sect2>
</sect1>

<sect1 id="upgrade">
  <title>Upgrading from previous releases of &os;</title>

  <para></para>

  <important>
    <para>Upgrading &os; should, of course, only be attempted after
      backing up <emphasis>all</emphasis> data and configuration
      files.</para>
  </important>
</sect1>