The &os; Project $FreeBSD$ 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 The &os; Documentation Project &tm-attrib.freebsd; &tm-attrib.ibm; &tm-attrib.ieee; &tm-attrib.intel; &tm-attrib.sparc; &tm-attrib.general; The release notes for &os; &release.current; contain a summary of the changes made to the &os; base system on the &release.branch; development line. 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. NOTE: the full release notes were not available at the time the release builds were started. See the online version of the release notes for the most up to date information. The online release notes can be found at . This document contains the release notes for &os; &release.current;. 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; was created. Information regarding pre-built, binary &release.type; distributions along this branch can be found at . ]]> 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;. Information regarding pre-built, binary &release.type; distributions along this branch can be found at . ]]> 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. ]]> 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. 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. Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after &release.prev;, 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. Beginning with &os; 6.2-RELEASE, binary upgrades between RELEASE versions (and snapshots of the various security branches) are supported using the &man.freebsd-update.8; utility. The binary upgrade procedure will update unmodified userland utilities, as well as unmodified GENERIC or SMP kernels distributed as a part of an official &os; release. The &man.freebsd-update.8; utility requires that the host being upgraded have Internet connectivity. An older form of binary upgrade is supported through the Upgrade option from the main &man.sysinstall.8; menu on CDROM distribution media. This type of binary upgrade may be useful on non-&arch.i386;, non-&arch.amd64; machines or on systems with no Internet connectivity. Source-based upgrades (those based on recompiling the &os; base system from source code) from previous versions are supported, according to the instructions in /usr/src/UPDATING. Upgrading &os; should, of course, only be attempted after backing up all data and configuration files.