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10 <title>&os; &release.current; Release Notes</title>
12 <corpauthor>The &os; Project</corpauthor>
14 <pubdate>$FreeBSD$</pubdate>
28 <holder role="mailto:doc@FreeBSD.org">The &os; Documentation Project</holder>
31 <legalnotice id="trademarks" role="trademarks">
41 <para>The release notes for &os; &release.current; contain a summary
42 of the changes made to the &os; base system on the
43 &release.branch; development line.
44 This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since
45 the last release, as well as significant changes to the &os;
47 Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.</para>
52 <title>Introduction</title>
54 <para>This document contains the release notes for &os;
56 describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of &os;.
57 It also provides some notes on upgrading
58 from previous versions of &os;.</para>
60 <para releasetype="current">The &release.type; distribution to which these release notes
61 apply represents the latest point along the &release.branch; development
62 branch since &release.branch; was created. Information regarding pre-built, binary
63 &release.type; distributions along this branch
64 can be found at <ulink url="&release.url;"></ulink>.</para>
66 <para releasetype="snapshot">The &release.type; distribution to which these release notes
67 apply represents a point along the &release.branch; development
68 branch between &release.prev; and the future &release.next;.
70 pre-built, binary &release.type; distributions along this branch
71 can be found at <ulink url="&release.url;"></ulink>.</para>
73 <para releasetype="release">This distribution of &os; &release.current; is a
74 &release.type; distribution. It can be found at <ulink
75 url="&release.url;"></ulink> or any of its mirrors. More
76 information on obtaining this (or other) &release.type;
77 distributions of &os; can be found in the <ulink
78 url="&url.books.handbook;/mirrors.html"><quote>Obtaining
79 &os;</quote> appendix</ulink> to the <ulink
80 url="&url.books.handbook;/">&os;
81 Handbook</ulink>.</para>
83 <para>All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before
84 installing &os;. The errata document is updated with
85 <quote>late-breaking</quote> information discovered late in the
86 release cycle or after the release. Typically, it contains
87 information on known bugs, security advisories, and corrections to
88 documentation. An up-to-date copy of the errata for &os;
89 &release.current; can be found on the &os; Web site.</para>
94 <title>What's New</title>
96 <para>This section describes
97 the most user-visible new or changed features in &os;
99 In general, changes described here are unique to the &release.branch;
100 branch unless specifically marked as &merged; features.
103 <para>Typical release note items
104 document recent security advisories issued after
106 new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options,
107 major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also
108 list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering
109 practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single
110 change made to &os; between releases; this document focuses
111 primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major
112 architectural improvements.</para>
114 <sect2 id="security">
115 <title>Security Advisories</title>
122 <title>Kernel Changes</title>
124 <para>A new &man.cpuset.2; API has been added
125 for thread to CPU binding and CPU resource grouping and
126 assignment. The &man.cpuset.1; userland utility has been added
127 to allow manipulation of processor sets.</para>
129 <para role="merged">The &man.ddb.4; kernel debugger now has an output capture
130 facility. Input and output from &man.ddb.4; can now be captured
131 to a memory buffer for later inspection using &man.sysctl.8; or
132 a textdump. The new <command>capture</command> command controls
135 <para role="merged">The &man.ddb.4; debugger now supports a simple scripting
136 facility, which supports a set of named scripts consisting of a
137 set of &man.ddb.4; commands. These commands can be managed from
138 within &man.ddb.4; or with the use of the new &man.ddb.8;
139 utility. More details can be found in the &man.ddb.4; manual
142 <para role="merged">The kernel now supports a new textdump format of kernel
143 dumps. A textdump provides higher-level information via
144 mechanically generated/extracted debugging output, rather than a
145 simple memory dump. This facility can be used to generate brief
146 kernel bug reports that are rich in debugging information, but
147 are not dependent on kernel symbol tables or precisely
148 synchronized source code. More information can be found in the
149 &man.textdump.4; manual page.</para>
151 <para>Kernel support for M:N threading has been removed. While
152 the KSE (Kernel Scheduled Entities) project was quite successful
153 in bringing threading to FreeBSD, the M:N approach taken by the
154 KSE library was never developed to its full potential.
155 Backwards compatibility for applications using KSE threading
156 will be provided via &man.libmap.conf.5; for dynamically linked
157 binaries. The &os; Project greatly appreciates the work of
158 &a.julian;, &a.deischen;, and &a.davidxu; on KSE support.</para>
160 <para>The &os; kernel now exports information about certain kernel
161 features via the <varname>kern.features</varname> sysctl tree.
162 The &man.feature.present.3; library call provides a convenient
163 interface for user applications to test the presence of
166 <para arch="amd64">The &os; kernel now has support for large
167 memory page mappings (<quote>superpages</quote>).</para>
169 <para arch="amd64,i386,ia64,powerpc" role="merged">The ULE
170 scheduler is now the default process scheduler
171 in <filename>GENERIC</filename> kernels.</para>
174 <title>Boot Loader Changes</title>
176 <para arch="amd64,i386" role="merged">The BTX kernel used by the boot
177 loader has been changed to invoke BIOS routines from real
178 mode. This change makes it possible to boot &os; from USB
181 <para arch="amd64,i386" role="merged">A new gptboot boot loader has
182 been added to support booting from a GPT labeled disk. A
183 new <command>boot</command> command has been added to
184 &man.gpt.8;, which makes a GPT disk bootable by writing the
185 required bits of the boot loader, creating a new boot
186 partition if required.</para>
191 <title>Hardware Support</title>
193 <para role="merged">The &man.cmx.4; driver, a driver for Omnikey CardMan 4040
194 PCMCIA smartcard readers, has been added.</para>
196 <para>The &man.syscons.4; driver now supports Colemak keyboard layout.</para>
198 <para role="merged">The &man.uslcom.4; driver, a driver for Silicon
199 Laboratories CP2101/CP2102-based USB serial adapters, has been
200 imported from OpenBSD.</para>
203 <title>Multimedia Support</title>
210 <title>Network Interface Support</title>
212 <para>The &man.ale.4; driver has been added to provide support
213 for Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 Gigabit/Fast Ethernet controllers.</para>
215 <para>The &man.em.4; driver has been split into two drivers
216 with some common parts. The &man.em.4; driver will continue
217 to support adapters up to the 82575, as well as new
218 client/desktop adapters. A new &man.igb.4; driver
219 will support new server adapters.</para>
221 <para>The &man.jme.4; driver has been added to provide support
222 for PCIe network adapters based on JMicron JMC250 Gigabit
223 Ethernet and JMC260 Fast Ethernet controllers.</para>
225 <para>The &man.malo.4; driver has been added to provide
226 support for Marvell Libertas 88W8335 based PCI network
229 <para>The firmware for the &man.mxge.4; driver has been
230 updated from 1.4.25 to 1.4.29.</para>
232 <para>The &man.sf.4; driver has been overhauled to improve its
233 performance and to add support for checksum offloading. It
234 should also work on all architectures.</para>
236 <para>The &man.re.4; driver has been overhauled to fix a
237 number of issues. This driver now has Wake On LAN (WOL)
240 <para>The &man.vr.4; driver has been overhauled to fix a
241 number of outstanding issues. It also now works on all
242 architectures.</para>
244 <para arch="amd64,i386" role="merged">The &man.wpi.4; driver has
245 been updated to include a number of stability fixes.</para>
250 <sect3 id="net-proto">
251 <title>Network Protocols</title>
253 <para>The &man.bpf.4; packet filter and capture facility now
254 supports a zero-copy mode of operation, in which buffers are
255 loaned from a user process to the kernel. This feature can
256 be enabled by setting
257 the <varname>net.bpf.zerocopy_enable</varname> sysctl
258 variable to <literal>1</literal>.</para>
260 <para>ISDN4BSD(I4B), <filename>netatm</filename>, and all
261 related subsystems have been removed due to lack of
262 multi-processor support.</para>
264 <para role="merged">A bug in TCP options padding, where the wrong padding
265 bytes were used, has been fixed.</para>
267 <para role="merged">The IEEE 802.11s element identifiers have
268 been updated to reflect the final version of the amendment. This
269 update breaks compatibility with older mesh setups but is necessary
270 as the previous IDs are used by another amendment leading to
271 unexpected results when trying to associate with an accesspoint
272 using the affected IDs.</para>
277 <title>Disks and Storage</title>
279 <para role="merged">The &man.aac.4; driver now supports volumes larger than
282 <para>The &man.ata.4; driver now supports a spindown command for
283 disks; after a configurable amount of time, if no requests
284 have been received for a disk, the disk will be spun down
285 until the next request. The &man.atacontrol.8; utility now
286 supports a <command>spindown</command> command to configure
289 <para role="merged">The &man.hptrr.4; driver has been updated to version 1.2
290 from Highpoint.</para>
295 <title>File Systems</title>
297 <para>A problem with using &man.mmap.2; on ZFS filesystems has
300 <para>A new kernel-mode NFS lock manager has been added,
301 improving performance and behavior of NFS locking. A new
302 &man.clear.locks.8; command has been added to clear locks held
303 on behalf of an NFS client.</para>
305 <para role="merged">The <application>ZFS</application> file system
306 has been upgraded to version 28. Changes include Data
307 Deduplication, Triple parity RAIDZ, and zfs diff.</para>
312 <sect2 id="userland">
313 <title>Userland Changes</title>
315 <para role="merged">The &man.adduser.8; utility now supports
316 a <option>-M</option> option to set the mode of a new user's
317 home directory.</para>
319 <para>BSD-licensed versions of &man.ar.1; and &man.ranlib.1;,
320 based on <filename>libarchive</filename>, have replaced the GNU
321 Binutils versions of these utilities.</para>
323 <para>BSD-licensed versions of &man.bc.1; and &man.dc.1; have
324 replaced their GNU counterparts.</para>
326 <para role="merged">&man.chflags.1; now supports a <option>-v</option> flag for
327 verbose output and a <option>-f</option> flag to ignore errors
328 with the same semantics as (for example)
329 &man.chmod.1;.</para>
331 <para>For compatibility with other implementations, &man.cp.1; now
332 supports a <option>-a</option> flag, which is equivalent to
333 specifying the <option>-RrP</option> flags.</para>
335 <para>BSD-licensed version of &man.cpio.1; based on
336 <filename>libarchive</filename>, has replaced the GNU cpio.
337 Note that the GNU cpio is still installed as
338 <filename>gcpio</filename>.</para>
340 <para>The &man.env.1; program now supports <option>-u
341 <replaceable>name</replaceable></option>
342 which will completely unset the given variable
343 <replaceable>name</replaceable> by removing it from the environment,
344 instead of just setting it to a null value.</para>
346 <para>The &man.fdopendir.3; library function has been added.</para>
348 <para role="merged">The &man.fetch.3; library now support HTTP 1.1
349 If-Modified-Since behavior. The &man.fetch.1; program now
350 supports <option>-i <replaceable>filename</replaceable></option>
351 which will only download the specified HTTP URL if the content
352 is newer than <replaceable>filename</replaceable>.</para>
354 <para>&man.find.1; has been enhanced by the addition of a number
355 of primaries that were present in GNU find but not &os;
358 <para>&man.kgdb.1; now supports a new <command>add-kld</command>
359 command to make it easier to debug crash dumps with kernel
362 <para>The &man.ls.1; program now supports a <option>-D</option>
363 option to specify a date format string to be used with the long
364 format (<option>-l</option>) output.</para>
366 <para>&man.nc.1; now supports a <option>-O</option> switch to
367 disable the use of TCP options.</para>
369 <para>&man.nc.1;'s <option>-o</option> switch has been deprecated.
370 It will be removed in a future release.</para>
372 <para>The &man.ping6.8; utility now returns <literal>2</literal>
373 when the packet transmission was successful but no responses
374 were received (this is the same behavior as &man.ping.8;).
375 It returned a non-zero value before this change.</para>
377 <para>The &man.procstat.1; utility has been added to display
378 detailed information about processes.</para>
380 <para role="merged">The &man.realpath.1; utility now supports
381 a <option>-q</option> flag to suppress warnings; it now also
382 accepts multiple paths on its command line.</para>
384 <para>&man.sh.1; has many bug fixes, some new features, and will now
385 refuse to parse some invalid scripts. Additionally, it now
386 has filename completion and defaults to the "emacs" editing
389 <para>The &man.split.1; utility now supports a <option>-n</option>
390 flag to split a file into a certain number of chunks.</para>
392 <para>The &man.tar.1; utility now supports a <option>-Z</option>
393 flag to enable &man.compress.1;-style
394 compression/decompression.</para>
396 <para>The &man.tar.1; utility now supports a
397 <option>--numeric-owner</option> flag to ignore user/group names
398 on create and extract.</para>
400 <para>The &man.tar.1; utility now supports an
401 <option>-S</option> flag to sparsify files on extraction.</para>
403 <para>The &man.tar.1; utility now supports a <option>-s</option>
404 flag to substitute filenames based on the specified regular
407 <para>The &man.tcgetsid.3; library function has been added to
408 return the process group ID for the session leader for the
409 controlling terminal. It is defined in IEEE Std 1003.1-2001
412 <para>&man.top.1; now supports a <option>-P</option> flag to
413 provide per-CPU usage statistics.</para>
415 <para>&man.zdump.8; is now working properly on 64 bit architectures.
418 <para>&man.traceroute.8; now has the ability to print the AS
419 number for each hop with the new <option>-a</option> switch; a
420 new <option>-A</option> option allows selecting a particular
423 <para>&man.traceroute6.8; now supports a <option>-U</option> flag
424 to send probe packets with no upper-layer protocol, rather than
425 the usual UDP probe packets.</para>
427 <sect3 id="rc-scripts">
428 <title><filename>/etc/rc.d</filename> Scripts</title>
436 <title>Contributed Software</title>
438 <para role="merged"><application>AMD</application> has been updated from 6.0.10
441 <para role="merged"><application>awk</application> has been updated from 1 May
442 2007 release to the 23 October 2007 release.</para>
444 <para role="merged"><application>bzip2</application> has been updated from 1.0.4
447 <para><application>CVS</application> has been updated from 1.11.17
448 to a post-1.11.22 snapshot from 10 March 2008.</para>
450 <para><application>FILE</application> has been updated from 4.23
453 <para><application>hostapd</application> has been
454 updated from 0.5.8 to 0.5.10.</para>
456 <para><application>IPFilter</application> has been updated from
457 4.1.23 to 4.1.28.</para>
459 <para><application>less</application> has been updated from
462 <para><application>ncurses</application> has been updated from
463 5.6-20061217 to 5.6-20080503.</para>
465 <para role="merged"><application>OpenSSH</application> has been updated
466 from 4.5p1 to 5.1p1.</para>
468 <para role="merged"><application>OpenPAM</application> has been updated from the
469 Figwort release to the Hydrangea release.</para>
471 <para role="merged"><application>sendmail</application> has been updated from
472 8.14.1 to 8.14.7.</para>
474 <para role="merged">The timezone database has been updated from
475 the <application>tzdata2008h</application> release to
476 the <application>tzdata2009m</application> release.</para>
478 <para>The stdtime part of libc, &man.zdump.8; and &man.zic.8;
479 have been updated from the <application>tzcode2004a</application>
480 release to the <application>tzcode2009h</application> release.
481 If you have upgraded from source or via the &man.freebsd-update.8;,
482 then please run &man.tzsetup.8; to install a new /etc/localtime.
485 <para><application>WPA Supplicant</application> has been
486 updated from 0.5.8 to 0.5.10.</para>
488 <para role="merged"><application>xz</application> has been updated
489 from snapshot as of 12 April 2010 to 5.0.0.</para>
494 <title>Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure</title>
496 <para>The &man.pkg.create.1; utility now supports
497 <option>-n</option>. When this option is specified and a
498 package tarball exists, it will not be overwritten. This is
499 useful when multiple packages are saved with several consecutive
500 runs of &man.pkg.create.1; with the <option>-Rb</option>
503 <para>The pkg_sign and pkg_check utilities for cryptographically
504 signing &os; packages have been removed. They were only useful
505 for packages compressed using &man.gzip.1;; however
506 &man.bzip2.1; compression has been the norm for some time
512 <title>Release Engineering and Integration</title>
514 <para role="merged">The supported version of
515 the <application>GNOME</application> desktop environment
516 (<filename role="package">x11/gnome2</filename>) has been
517 updated from 2.20.1 to 2.22.</para>
522 <title>Documentation</title>
530 <title>Upgrading from previous releases of &os;</title>
532 <para arch="amd64,i386">Beginning with &os; 6.2-RELEASE,
533 binary upgrades between RELEASE versions (and snapshots of the
534 various security branches) are supported using the
535 &man.freebsd-update.8; utility. The binary upgrade procedure will
536 update unmodified userland utilities, as well as unmodified GENERIC or
537 SMP kernels distributed as a part of an official &os; release.
538 The &man.freebsd-update.8; utility requires that the host being
539 upgraded have Internet connectivity.</para>
541 <para>Source-based upgrades (those based on recompiling the &os;
542 base system from source code) from previous versions are
543 supported, according to the instructions in
544 <filename>/usr/src/UPDATING</filename>.</para>
547 <para>Upgrading &os; should, of course, only be attempted after
548 backing up <emphasis>all</emphasis> data and configuration