&os;/&arch; &release.current; Release NotesThe &os; Project$FreeBSD$200020012002200320042005The &os; Documentation ProjectThe 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.IntroductionThis 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;.
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 .
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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 .
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This distribution of &os; &release.current; is a
&release.type; distribution. It can be found at or any of its mirrors. More
information on obtaining this (or other) &release.type;
distributions of &os; can be found in the Obtaining
&os; appendix to the &os;
Handbook.
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All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before
installing &os;. 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 &os;
&release.current; can be found on the &os; Web site.What's NewThis 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.
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.Security AdvisoriesA bug in the &man.fetch.1; utility which allows
a malicious HTTP server to cause arbitrary portions of the client's
memory to be overwritten, has been fixed.
For more information, see security advisory
FreeBSD-SA-04:16.fetch.
&merged;A bug in &man.procfs.5; and &man.linprocfs.5;
which could cause a malicious local user could perform a local
denial of service attack by causing a system panic, or the user
could read parts of kernel memory, has been fixed.
For more information, see security advisory
FreeBSD-SA-04:17.procfs.
&merged;Kernel ChangesSupport for 80386 processors (the
I386_CPU kernel configuration option) has
been removed. Users running this class of CPU should use &os;
5.X or earlier.The loader tunable debug.mpsafevm has been
has been enabled by default.MemGuard, a kernel memory allocator designed to help detect
tamper-after-free scenarios, has been added.
This must be explicitly enabled via options
DEBUG_MEMGUARD, plus small kernel modifications. It
is generally intended for use by kernel developers.A number of bugs have been fixed in the ULE
scheduler. &merged;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)
debug.mpsafevfs, which currently defaults to
0 (disabled).A bug in Inter-Processor Interrupt (IPI)
handling, which could cause SMP systems to crash under heavy
load, has been fixed. More details are contained in errata note
FreeBSD-EN-05:03.ipi.
&merged;System V IPC objects (message queues, semaphores, and shared
memory) now have support for Mandatory Access Control policies,
notably &man.mac.biba.4;, &man.mac.mls.4;, &man.mac.stub.4;, and
&man.mac.test.4;.Boot Loader ChangesA serial console-capable version of
boot0 has been added. It can be written
to a disk using &man.boot0cfg.8; and specifying
/boot/boot0sio as the argument to the
option.cdboot now works around a
BIOS problem observed on some systems when booting from USB
CDROM drives.The autoboot loader command
now supports the prompt parameter.Hardware SupportThe &man.auxio.4; driver has been to drive
some auxiliary I/O functions found on various SBus/EBus
&ultrasparc; models. &merged;A framework for flexible processor speed control has been
added. It provides methods for various drivers to control CPU
power utilization by adjusting the processor speed. More
details can be found in the &man.cpufreq.4; manual page.
Currently supported drivers include acpi_perf (ACPI CPU
performance states), ichss (Intel SpeedStep for ICH), and
acpi_throttle (ACPI CPU throttling).Support for the OLDCARD subsystem has
been removed. The NEWCARD system is now used for all PCCARD
device support.The pcii driver has been added to support GPIB-PCIIA IEEE-488
cards.The &man.psm.4; driver now has improved support for
Synaptics Touchpad users. It now has better tracking of
slow-speed movement and now has support for various extra
buttons and dials. These features can be tuned with the
hw.psm.synaptics.*
hierarchy of sysctl variables.The rtc driver has been added to support
the MC146818-compatible clock found on some &ultrasparc; II
and III models. &merged;The &man.uart.4; driver is now enabled in
the GENERIC kernel, and is now the
default driver for serial ports. The ofw_console,
&man.sab.4;, and zs drivers are now disabled in the
GENERIC kernel. &merged;The &man.uplcom.4; driver now supports handling of the
CTS signal.Multimedia SupportThe &man.snd.audiocs.4; driver has been
added to support the Crystal Semiconductor CS4231 audio
controller found on &ultrasparc;
workstations. &merged;The &man.uaudio.4; driver now has some added
functionality, including volume control on more inputs and
recording capability on some devices.Network Interface SupportThe &man.ath.4; driver has been updated to split the
transmit rate control algorithm into a separate module.
Either device ath_rate_onoe or
device ath_rate_amrr must be included in
the kernel configuration when using the &man.ath.4;
driver.The &man.cp.4; driver is now MPSAFE. &merged;The &man.ctau.4; driver is now MPSAFE. &merged;The &man.cx.4; driver is now MPSAFE. &merged;The &man.dc.4; driver now supports the &man.altq.4; framework.In the &man.em.4; driver, hardware support for VLAN
tagging is now disabled by default due to some interactions
between this feature and promiscuous mode. &merged;Ethernet flow control is now disabled by default in the
&man.fxp.4; driver, to prevent problems with a system panics
or is left in the kernel debugger. &merged;The &man.hme.4; driver is now MPSAFE. &merged;The &man.ndis.4; device driver wrapper now
supports &windows;/x86-64 binaries on amd64
systems. &merged;The &man.sf.4; driver now has support for device polling
and &man.altq.4;. &merged;Several programming errors in the &man.sk.4; driver have
been corrected. This bug was particular to SMP systems, and
could cause panics, page faults, aborted SSH connections, or
corrupted file transfers. More details can be found in
errata note
FreeBSD-EN-05:02.sk.
&merged;The &man.sk.4; driver now has support for &man.altq.4;.
This driver also now supports jumbo frames on Yukon-based
interfaces. &merged;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
wlan_wep module to be loaded (or
compiled) into the kernel.Network ProtocolsThe MTU feedback in IPv6 has been disabled when the sender writes
data that must be fragmented.&man.ipfw.8; now supports classification and tagging
of the &man.altq.4;, packets via a divert socket,
and TCP data length.Ongoing work is reducing the use of the Giant lock by the
network protocol stack and improving the locking
strategies.The &man.sppp.4; driver now includes Frame Relay
support. &merged;A bug in TCP that sometimes caused RST packets to
be ignored if the receive window was zero bytes has been
fixed. &merged;Several bugs in the TCP SACK implementation have been
fixed. &merged;RFC 1644 T/TCP support has been removed.Random ephemeral port number allocation has led to some
problems with port reuse at high connection rates. This
feature is now disabled during periods of high connection
rates; whenever new connections are created faster than
net.inet.ip.portrange.randomcps per second,
port number randomization is disabled for the next
net.inet.ip.portrange.randomtime
seconds. The default values for these two sysctl variables
are 10 and 45,
respectively.Fine-grained locking has been applied to many of the data
structures in the IPX/SPX protocol stack. While not fully
MPSAFE at this point, it is generally safe to use IPX/SPX
without the Giant lock (in other words, the
debug.mpsafenet sysctl variable may be set
to 1).Disks and StorageThe &man.amr.4; driver is now safe for use on systems
using &man.pae.4;. &merged;The SHSEC GEOM class has been added. It provides for the
sharing of a secret between multiple GEOM providers. All of
these providers must be present in order to reveal the
secret. This feature is controlled by the &man.gshsec.8;
utility.The &man.matcd.4; driver has been removed.The default SCSI boot-time probe delay in the
GENERIC kernel has been reduced from
fifteen seconds to five seconds.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.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. &merged;File SystemsThe autofs(9) file system and the userland library
&man.libautofs.3; have been added.A kernel panic in the NFS server has been fixed. More
details can be found in errata note
FreeBSD-EN-05:01.nfs.
&merged;Contributed SoftwareACPI-CA has been updated from
20040527 to 20041119. &merged;Userland ChangesThe &man.burncd.8; utility now allows commands (such as
eject) to take place after fixating a
disk.The create command of the &man.gpt.8;
utility now supports a command-line flag to
force creation of a GPT even when there is an MBR record on a
disk. &merged;The &man.dump.8; utility now supports a
flag to suppress the creation of a .snap
directory on new file systems. This feature is intended for use
on memory or vnode file systems that will not require snapshot
support.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.Support for abbreviated forms of a number of &man.ipfw.8;
options has been deprecated. Warnings are printed to stderr
indicated the correct full form when one of these abbreviations
is detected.The libarchive library (as well as the
&man.tar.1; command that uses it) now has support for reading ISO
images (with optional RockRidge extensions) and ZIP archives
(with deflate and none
compression).The NO_NIS compile-time knob for userland
has been added. As its name implies, enabling this
Makefile variable will cause NIS support to
be excluded from various programs and will cause the NIS
utilities to not be built. &merged;The &man.mkuzip.8;, which is a non-GPL
utility to compress file system images for use with
GEOM_UZIP &man.geom.4; module,
has been added.The &man.newsyslog.8; utility now supports
a option to specify an alternate root for log files
similar to DESTDIR in the BSD make process.
This only affects log file paths, not config file ()
or archive directory () paths.The &man.ncal.1; utility now supports a
flag to generate a calendar for a specified month in the current
year. &merged;The libgpib library has been added to
give userland access to GPIB devices (using the the pcii driver)
via the
ibfoo
API.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.For years, &os; has used Makefile
variables of the form
NOFOO and
NO_FOO. For
consistency, those variables using the former naming convention
have been converted to the
NO_FOO form. The
file /usr/share/mk/bsd.compat.mk has a
complete list of these variables; it also implements some
temporary backward compatibility for the old names.The &man.ppp.8; program now implements an
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 enable
echo to get this behavior. &merged;An &man.rpmatch.3; library function has been added to check
a string for being an affirmative or negative response in the
current locale.The &man.telnet.1; and &man.telnetd.8; programs now support
the option for specifying a numeric TOS
byte.The &man.tcpdrop.8; command, which closes a selected TCP
connection, has been added. It was obtained from
OpenBSD.&man.whois.1; now supports
a flag
for querying whois.krnic.net
(the National Internet Development Agency of Korea)
which hold details of IP address allocations within
Korea. &merged;/etc/rc.d ScriptsContributed SoftwareFILE has been updated from 4.10
to 4.12.lukemftp has been updated from a
26 April 2004 snapshot from OpenBSD's sources to a snapshot as
of 19 February 2005.A snapshot of netcat from OpenBSD
as of 4 February 2005 has been added. More information can be
found in the &man.nc.1; manual page. &merged;OpenPAM has been updated from the
Eelgrass release to the Feterita release.OpenSSH has been updated from 3.8p1
to 3.9p1.sendmail has been updated from
version 8.13.1 to version 8.13.3. &merged;The timezone database has been updated from the
tzdata2004e release to the
tzdata2004g release. &merged;Ports/Packages Collection InfrastructureRelease Engineering and IntegrationDocumentationManual pages in the base system have received a number of
cleanups, both for content and presentation. Cross-references
are more correct and consistent, standard section headings are
now used throughout, and markup has been cleaned up.Upgrading from previous releases of &os;Upgrading &os; should, of course, only be attempted after
backing up all data and configuration
files.