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10 <title>&os; &release.current; Release Notes</title>
12 <corpauthor>The &os; Project</corpauthor>
14 <pubdate>$FreeBSD$</pubdate>
31 <holder role="mailto:doc@FreeBSD.org">The &os; Documentation Project</holder>
34 <legalnotice id="trademarks" role="trademarks">
44 <para>The release notes for &os; &release.current; contain a summary
45 of the changes made to the &os; base system on the
46 &release.branch; development line.
47 This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since
48 the last release, as well as significant changes to the &os;
50 Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.</para>
55 <title>Introduction</title>
57 <para>This document contains the release notes for &os;
59 describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of &os;.
60 It also provides some notes on upgrading
61 from previous versions of &os;.</para>
63 <para releasetype="current">The &release.type; distribution to which these release notes
64 apply represents the latest point along the &release.branch; development
65 branch since &release.branch; was created. Information regarding pre-built, binary
66 &release.type; distributions along this branch
67 can be found at <ulink url="&release.url;"></ulink>.</para>
69 <para releasetype="snapshot">The &release.type; distribution to which these release notes
70 apply represents a point along the &release.branch; development
71 branch between &release.prev; and the future &release.next;.
73 pre-built, binary &release.type; distributions along this branch
74 can be found at <ulink url="&release.url;"></ulink>.</para>
76 <para releasetype="release">This distribution of &os; &release.current; is a
77 &release.type; distribution. It can be found at <ulink
78 url="&release.url;"></ulink> or any of its mirrors. More
79 information on obtaining this (or other) &release.type;
80 distributions of &os; can be found in the <ulink
81 url="&url.books.handbook;/mirrors.html"><quote>Obtaining
82 &os;</quote> appendix</ulink> to the <ulink
83 url="&url.books.handbook;/">&os;
84 Handbook</ulink>.</para>
86 <para>All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before
87 installing &os;. The errata document is updated with
88 <quote>late-breaking</quote> information discovered late in the
89 release cycle or after the release. Typically, it contains
90 information on known bugs, security advisories, and corrections to
91 documentation. An up-to-date copy of the errata for &os;
92 &release.current; can be found on the &os; Web site.</para>
97 <title>What's New</title>
99 <para>This section describes
100 the most user-visible new or changed features in &os;
101 since &release.prev;.
102 In general, changes described here are unique to the &release.branch;
103 branch unless specifically marked as &merged; features.
106 <para>Typical release note items
107 document recent security advisories issued after
109 new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options,
110 major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also
111 list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering
112 practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single
113 change made to &os; between releases; this document focuses
114 primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major
115 architectural improvements.</para>
117 <sect2 id="security">
118 <title>Security Advisories</title>
125 <title>Kernel Changes</title>
127 <para>A new &man.cpuset.2; API has been added
128 for thread to CPU binding and CPU resource grouping and
129 assignment. The &man.cpuset.1; userland utility has been added
130 to allow manipulation of processor sets.</para>
132 <para role="merged">The &man.ddb.4; kernel debugger now has an output capture
133 facility. Input and output from &man.ddb.4; can now be captured
134 to a memory buffer for later inspection using &man.sysctl.8; or
135 a textdump. The new <command>capture</command> command controls
138 <para role="merged">The &man.ddb.4; debugger now supports a simple scripting
139 facility, which supports a set of named scripts consisting of a
140 set of &man.ddb.4; commands. These commands can be managed from
141 within &man.ddb.4; or with the use of the new &man.ddb.8;
142 utility. More details can be found in the &man.ddb.4; manual
145 <para role="merged">The kernel now supports a new textdump format of kernel
146 dumps. A textdump provides higher-level information via
147 mechanically generated/extracted debugging output, rather than a
148 simple memory dump. This facility can be used to generate brief
149 kernel bug reports that are rich in debugging information, but
150 are not dependent on kernel symbol tables or precisely
151 synchronized source code. More information can be found in the
152 &man.textdump.4; manual page.</para>
154 <para>Kernel support for M:N threading has been removed. While
155 the KSE (Kernel Scheduled Entities) project was quite successful
156 in bringing threading to FreeBSD, the M:N approach taken by the
157 KSE library was never developed to its full potential.
158 Backwards compatibility for applications using KSE threading
159 will be provided via &man.libmap.conf.5; for dynamically linked
160 binaries. The &os; Project greatly appreciates the work of
161 &a.julian;, &a.deischen;, and &a.davidxu; on KSE support.</para>
163 <para>The &os; kernel now exports information about certain kernel
164 features via the <varname>kern.features</varname> sysctl tree.
165 The &man.feature.present.3; library call provides a convenient
166 interface for user applications to test the presence of
169 <para arch="amd64">The &os; kernel now has support for large
170 memory page mappings (<quote>superpages</quote>).</para>
172 <para arch="amd64,i386,ia64,powerpc" role="merged">The ULE
173 scheduler is now the default process scheduler
174 in <filename>GENERIC</filename> kernels.</para>
177 <title>Boot Loader Changes</title>
179 <para arch="amd64,i386" role="merged">The BTX kernel used by the boot
180 loader has been changed to invoke BIOS routines from real
181 mode. This change makes it possible to boot &os; from USB
184 <para arch="amd64,i386" role="merged">A new gptboot boot loader has
185 been added to support booting from a GPT labeled disk. A
186 new <command>boot</command> command has been added to
187 &man.gpt.8;, which makes a GPT disk bootable by writing the
188 required bits of the boot loader, creating a new boot
189 partition if required.</para>
194 <title>Hardware Support</title>
196 <para role="merged">The &man.cmx.4; driver, a driver for Omnikey CardMan 4040
197 PCMCIA smartcard readers, has been added.</para>
199 <para>The &man.syscons.4; driver now supports Colemak keyboard layout.</para>
201 <para role="merged">The &man.uslcom.4; driver, a driver for Silicon
202 Laboratories CP2101/CP2102-based USB serial adapters, has been
203 imported from OpenBSD.</para>
206 <title>Multimedia Support</title>
213 <title>Network Interface Support</title>
215 <para>The &man.ale.4; driver has been added to provide support
216 for Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 Gigabit/Fast Ethernet controllers.</para>
218 <para>The &man.em.4; driver has been split into two drivers
219 with some common parts. The &man.em.4; driver will continue
220 to support adapters up to the 82575, as well as new
221 client/desktop adapters. A new &man.igb.4; driver
222 will support new server adapters.</para>
224 <para>The &man.jme.4; driver has been added to provide support
225 for PCIe network adapters based on JMicron JMC250 Gigabit
226 Ethernet and JMC260 Fast Ethernet controllers.</para>
228 <para>The &man.malo.4; driver has been added to provide
229 support for Marvell Libertas 88W8335 based PCI network
232 <para>The firmware for the &man.mxge.4; driver has been
233 updated from 1.4.25 to 1.4.29.</para>
235 <para>The &man.sf.4; driver has been overhauled to improve its
236 performance and to add support for checksum offloading. It
237 should also work on all architectures.</para>
239 <para>The &man.re.4; driver has been overhauled to fix a
240 number of issues. This driver now has Wake On LAN (WOL)
243 <para>The &man.vr.4; driver has been overhauled to fix a
244 number of outstanding issues. It also now works on all
245 architectures.</para>
247 <para arch="amd64,i386" role="merged">The &man.wpi.4; driver has
248 been updated to include a number of stability fixes.</para>
253 <sect3 id="net-proto">
254 <title>Network Protocols</title>
256 <para>The &man.bpf.4; packet filter and capture facility now
257 supports a zero-copy mode of operation, in which buffers are
258 loaned from a user process to the kernel. This feature can
259 be enabled by setting
260 the <varname>net.bpf.zerocopy_enable</varname> sysctl
261 variable to <literal>1</literal>.</para>
263 <para>ISDN4BSD(I4B), <filename>netatm</filename>, and all
264 related subsystems have been removed due to lack of
265 multi-processor support.</para>
267 <para role="merged">A bug in TCP options padding, where the wrong padding
268 bytes were used, has been fixed.</para>
270 <para role="merged">The IEEE 802.11s element identifiers have
271 been updated to reflect the final version of the amendment. This
272 update breaks compatibility with older mesh setups but is necessary
273 as the previous IDs are used by another amendment leading to
274 unexpected results when trying to associate with an accesspoint
275 using the affected IDs.</para>
280 <title>Disks and Storage</title>
282 <para role="merged">The &man.aac.4; driver now supports volumes larger than
285 <para>The &man.ata.4; driver now supports a spindown command for
286 disks; after a configurable amount of time, if no requests
287 have been received for a disk, the disk will be spun down
288 until the next request. The &man.atacontrol.8; utility now
289 supports a <command>spindown</command> command to configure
292 <para role="merged">The &man.hptrr.4; driver has been updated to version 1.2
293 from Highpoint.</para>
298 <title>File Systems</title>
300 <para>A problem with using &man.mmap.2; on ZFS filesystems has
303 <para>A new kernel-mode NFS lock manager has been added,
304 improving performance and behavior of NFS locking. A new
305 &man.clear.locks.8; command has been added to clear locks held
306 on behalf of an NFS client.</para>
308 <para role="merged">The <application>ZFS</application> file system
309 has been upgraded to version 28. Changes include Data
310 Deduplication, Triple parity RAIDZ, and zfs diff.</para>
315 <sect2 id="userland">
316 <title>Userland Changes</title>
318 <para role="merged">The &man.adduser.8; utility now supports
319 a <option>-M</option> option to set the mode of a new user's
320 home directory.</para>
322 <para>BSD-licensed versions of &man.ar.1; and &man.ranlib.1;,
323 based on <filename>libarchive</filename>, have replaced the GNU
324 Binutils versions of these utilities.</para>
326 <para>BSD-licensed versions of &man.bc.1; and &man.dc.1; have
327 replaced their GNU counterparts.</para>
329 <para role="merged">&man.chflags.1; now supports a <option>-v</option> flag for
330 verbose output and a <option>-f</option> flag to ignore errors
331 with the same semantics as (for example)
332 &man.chmod.1;.</para>
334 <para>For compatibility with other implementations, &man.cp.1; now
335 supports a <option>-a</option> flag, which is equivalent to
336 specifying the <option>-RrP</option> flags.</para>
338 <para>BSD-licensed version of &man.cpio.1; based on
339 <filename>libarchive</filename>, has replaced the GNU cpio.
340 Note that the GNU cpio is still installed as
341 <filename>gcpio</filename>.</para>
343 <para>The &man.env.1; program now supports <option>-u
344 <replaceable>name</replaceable></option>
345 which will completely unset the given variable
346 <replaceable>name</replaceable> by removing it from the environment,
347 instead of just setting it to a null value.</para>
349 <para>The &man.fdopendir.3; library function has been added.</para>
351 <para role="merged">The &man.fetch.3; library now support HTTP 1.1
352 If-Modified-Since behavior. The &man.fetch.1; program now
353 supports <option>-i <replaceable>filename</replaceable></option>
354 which will only download the specified HTTP URL if the content
355 is newer than <replaceable>filename</replaceable>.</para>
357 <para>&man.find.1; has been enhanced by the addition of a number
358 of primaries that were present in GNU find but not &os;
361 <para>&man.kgdb.1; now supports a new <command>add-kld</command>
362 command to make it easier to debug crash dumps with kernel
365 <para>The &man.ls.1; program now supports a <option>-D</option>
366 option to specify a date format string to be used with the long
367 format (<option>-l</option>) output.</para>
369 <para>&man.nc.1; now supports a <option>-O</option> switch to
370 disable the use of TCP options.</para>
372 <para>&man.nc.1;'s <option>-o</option> switch has been deprecated.
373 It will be removed in a future release.</para>
375 <para>The &man.ping6.8; utility now returns <literal>2</literal>
376 when the packet transmission was successful but no responses
377 were received (this is the same behavior as &man.ping.8;).
378 It returned a non-zero value before this change.</para>
380 <para>The &man.procstat.1; utility has been added to display
381 detailed information about processes.</para>
383 <para role="merged">The &man.realpath.1; utility now supports
384 a <option>-q</option> flag to suppress warnings; it now also
385 accepts multiple paths on its command line.</para>
387 <para>&man.sh.1; has many bug fixes, some new features, and will now
388 refuse to parse some invalid scripts. Additionally, it now
389 has filename completion and defaults to the "emacs" editing
392 <para>The &man.split.1; utility now supports a <option>-n</option>
393 flag to split a file into a certain number of chunks.</para>
395 <para>The &man.tar.1; utility now supports a <option>-Z</option>
396 flag to enable &man.compress.1;-style
397 compression/decompression.</para>
399 <para>The &man.tar.1; utility now supports a
400 <option>--numeric-owner</option> flag to ignore user/group names
401 on create and extract.</para>
403 <para>The &man.tar.1; utility now supports an
404 <option>-S</option> flag to sparsify files on extraction.</para>
406 <para>The &man.tar.1; utility now supports a <option>-s</option>
407 flag to substitute filenames based on the specified regular
410 <para>The &man.tcgetsid.3; library function has been added to
411 return the process group ID for the session leader for the
412 controlling terminal. It is defined in IEEE Std 1003.1-2001
415 <para>&man.top.1; now supports a <option>-P</option> flag to
416 provide per-CPU usage statistics.</para>
418 <para>&man.zdump.8; is now working properly on 64 bit architectures.
421 <para>&man.traceroute.8; now has the ability to print the AS
422 number for each hop with the new <option>-a</option> switch; a
423 new <option>-A</option> option allows selecting a particular
426 <para>&man.traceroute6.8; now supports a <option>-U</option> flag
427 to send probe packets with no upper-layer protocol, rather than
428 the usual UDP probe packets.</para>
430 <sect3 id="rc-scripts">
431 <title><filename>/etc/rc.d</filename> Scripts</title>
439 <title>Contributed Software</title>
441 <para role="merged"><application>AMD</application> has been updated from 6.0.10
444 <para role="merged"><application>awk</application> has been updated from 1 May
445 2007 release to the 23 October 2007 release.</para>
447 <para role="merged"><application>bzip2</application> has been updated from 1.0.4
450 <para><application>CVS</application> has been updated from 1.11.17
451 to a post-1.11.22 snapshot from 10 March 2008.</para>
453 <para><application>FILE</application> has been updated from 4.23
456 <para><application>hostapd</application> has been
457 updated from 0.5.8 to 0.5.10.</para>
459 <para><application>IPFilter</application> has been updated from
460 4.1.23 to 4.1.28.</para>
462 <para><application>less</application> has been updated from
465 <para><application>ncurses</application> has been updated from
466 5.6-20061217 to 5.6-20080503.</para>
468 <para role="merged"><application>OpenSSH</application> has been updated
469 from 4.5p1 to 5.1p1.</para>
471 <para role="merged"><application>OpenPAM</application> has been updated from the
472 Figwort release to the Hydrangea release.</para>
474 <para role="merged"><application>sendmail</application> has been updated from
475 8.14.1 to 8.14.7.</para>
477 <para role="merged">The timezone database has been updated from
478 the <application>tzdata2008h</application> release to
479 the <application>tzdata2009m</application> release.</para>
481 <para>The stdtime part of libc, &man.zdump.8; and &man.zic.8;
482 have been updated from the <application>tzcode2004a</application>
483 release to the <application>tzcode2009h</application> release.
484 If you have upgraded from source or via the &man.freebsd-update.8;,
485 then please run &man.tzsetup.8; to install a new /etc/localtime.
488 <para><application>WPA Supplicant</application> has been
489 updated from 0.5.8 to 0.5.10.</para>
491 <para role="merged"><application>xz</application> has been updated
492 from snapshot as of 12 April 2010 to 5.0.0.</para>
497 <title>Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure</title>
499 <para>The &man.pkg.create.1; utility now supports
500 <option>-n</option>. When this option is specified and a
501 package tarball exists, it will not be overwritten. This is
502 useful when multiple packages are saved with several consecutive
503 runs of &man.pkg.create.1; with the <option>-Rb</option>
506 <para>The pkg_sign and pkg_check utilities for cryptographically
507 signing &os; packages have been removed. They were only useful
508 for packages compressed using &man.gzip.1;; however
509 &man.bzip2.1; compression has been the norm for some time
515 <title>Release Engineering and Integration</title>
517 <para role="merged">The supported version of
518 the <application>GNOME</application> desktop environment
519 (<filename role="package">x11/gnome2</filename>) has been
520 updated from 2.20.1 to 2.22.</para>
525 <title>Documentation</title>
533 <title>Upgrading from previous releases of &os;</title>
535 <para arch="amd64,i386">Beginning with &os; 6.2-RELEASE,
536 binary upgrades between RELEASE versions (and snapshots of the
537 various security branches) are supported using the
538 &man.freebsd-update.8; utility. The binary upgrade procedure will
539 update unmodified userland utilities, as well as unmodified GENERIC or
540 SMP kernels distributed as a part of an official &os; release.
541 The &man.freebsd-update.8; utility requires that the host being
542 upgraded have Internet connectivity.</para>
544 <para>Source-based upgrades (those based on recompiling the &os;
545 base system from source code) from previous versions are
546 supported, according to the instructions in
547 <filename>/usr/src/UPDATING</filename>.</para>
550 <para>Upgrading &os; should, of course, only be attempted after
551 backing up <emphasis>all</emphasis> data and configuration