FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE Release Notes

2.1 Security Advisories

Problems described in the following security advisories have been fixed. For more information, consult the individual advisories available from http://security.FreeBSD.org/.

2.2 Kernel Changes

The ddb(8) kernel debugger now supports a show mount subcommand.

The FreeBSD DTrace subsystem now supports a probe for process execution.

[amd64] The FreeBSD kernel virtual address space has been increased to 6GB. This allows subsystems to use larger virtual memory space than before. For example, zfs(8) adaptive replacement cache (ARC) requires large kernel memory space to cache file system data, so it benefits from the increased address space. Note that the ceiling on the kernel map size is now 60% of the size rather than an absolute quantity.

The jail(8) subsystem has been updated. Changes include:

• Multiple addresses of both IPv4 and IPv6 per jail has been supported. It is even possible to have jails without an IP address at all, which basically gives one a chrooted environment with restricted process view and no networking.

• SCTP (sctp(4)) with IPv6 in jails has been implemented.

• Specific CPU binding by using cpuset(1) has been implemented. Note that the current implementation allows the superuser inside of the jail to change the CPU bindings specified. This behavior will be fixed in the next release.

• A jail(8) can start with a specific route FIB now.

• A show jails subcommand in ddb(8) has been added.

• Compatibility support which permits 32-bit jail binaries to be used on 64-bit systems to manage jails has been added.

• Note that both version numbers of jail and prison in the jail(8) have been updated for the new features.

The kld(4) now supports installing 32-bit system calls to the FreeBSD system call translation layer from kernel modules.

The ktr(4) now supports a new KTR tracepoint in the KTR_CALLOUT class to note when a callout routine finishes executing.

Types of variables used to track the amount of allocated System V shared memory have been changed from int to size_t. This makes it possible to use more than 2 GB of memory for shared memory segments on 64-bit architectures. Please note the new BUGS section in shmctl(2) and /usr/src/UPDATING for limitations of this temporary solution.

The sysctl(3) leaf nodes have a flag to tag themselves as MPSAFE now.

The FreeBSD 32-bit system call translation layer now supports installing 32-bit system calls for VFS_AIO.

[amd64, i386] The FreeBSD virtual memory subsystem now supports fully transparent use of superpages for application memory; application memory pages are dynamically promoted to or demoted from superpages without any modification to application code. This change offers the benefit of large page sizes such as improved virtual memory efficiency and reduced TLB (translation lookaside buffer) misses without downsides like application changes and virtual memory inflexibility. This is disabled by default and can be enabled by setting a loader tunable vm.pmap.pg_ps_enabled to 1.

loader_conf_files="foo bar ${variable}"

2.3 Userland Changes

A bug in the atacontrol(8) utility, which prevents it from working when /usr is not mounted or invoked from /rescue, has been fixed.

The btpand(8) daemon from NetBSD has been added. This daemon provides support for Bluetooth Network Access Point (NAP), Group Ad-hoc Network (GN) and Personal Area Network User (PANU) profiles.

The ncal(1) utility now supports multibyte characters.

The config(8) utility now supports multiple makeoption lines.

The csup(1) utility now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository. Note that the rsync transfer mode is currently disabled.

The dirname(1) utility now accepts multiple arguments in the same way that basename(1) does.

The du(1) utility now supports an -l flag. When specified, the du(1) utility counts a file with multiple hard links as multiple different files.

The du(1) utility now supports an -A flag to display the apparent size instead of the disk usage. This can be helpful when operating on compressed volumes or sparse files.

The du(1) utility now supports a -B blocksize option to calculate block counts in blocks of blocksize bytes. This is different from the -k or -m options or setting BLOCKSIZE and gives an estimate of how much space the examined file hierarchy would require on a file system with the given blocksize. Unless in -A mode, blocksize is rounded up to the next multiple of 512.

The dumpfs(8) utility now supports an -f flag, which causes it to list all free fragments in the file system by fragment (block) number. This new mode does the necessary arithmetic to generate absolute fragment numbers rather than the cg-relative numbers printed in the default mode.

If -f is passed once, contiguous fragment ranges are collapsed into an X-Y format as free block lists are currently printed in regular dumpfs output. If specified twice, all block numbers are printed individually, allowing both compact and more script-friendly representation.

The fetch(1) utility now supports an -i flag which supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP 1.1 request. If specified it will cause the file to be downloaded only if it is more recent than the mtime of the local file. Also, libfetch now accepts the mtime in the url structure and a flag to indicate when this behavior is desired.

The fsck(8) utility now supports a -C flag for check clean mode. This checks if the file system was dismounted cleanly first and then skip file system checks if true. Otherwise it does full checks.

The fsck(8) utility now supports a -D flag for damaged recovery mode, which will enable certain aggressive operations that can make fsck(8) to survive with file systems that has very serious data damage. This is a useful last resort when on disk data damage is very serious and causes fsck(8) to crash.

The getaddrinfo(3) function now supports SCTP.

A bug was fixed in the ipfw(8) utility which displays extra messages for a NAT rule even when a -q flag is specified.

The ln(1) utility now supports a -w flag to check if the source file actually exists. When the flag is specified and the file does not exist, ln(1) will issue a warning message.

The make(1) utility now supports a -p flag to print the input graph only, without executing any commands. The output is the same as -d g1. When combined with -f /dev/null, only the built-in rules of make are displayed.

The make(1) utility now supports a -Q flag to cause file banners not to be generated in addition to the same effect of a -q flag when a -j option is specified.

The make(1) utility now supports the .MAKE.JOB.PREFIX variable. If -j and -v are specified, its output for each target is prefixed with a token --- target --- the first part of which can be controlled via the variable.

The make(1) utility now supports .MAKE.PID and .MAKE.PPID variable. These are set to process ID of the make(1) process and its parent process respectively.

The makefs(8) utility to create a file system image from a directory tree has been added.

The mergemaster(8) utility now supports an -F option to automatically install files that differ only in their version control ID strings.

The mount(8) utility now supports an -o mountprog=/somewhere/mount_xxx option to force it to use the specified program to mount the file system instead of calling nmount(2) directly. This is useful when you want to use third party programs such as FUSE, for example.

The netstat(1) utility now reports unix(4) sockets' listen queue statistics when an -L flag is specified.

A bug in the netstat(1) utility has been fixed. It crashed with the following options in the previous versions:

% netstat -m -N foo

A bug in the netstat(1) utility has been fixed. The -ss option now works in the icmp6 section as expected.

The pciconf(8) utility now supports a -b flag, which lists any base address registers (BAR) that are assigned resources for each device.

The powerd(8) program has been improved. Changes include reasonable CPU load estimation on SMP systems and a new mode named as hiadaptive for AC-powered systems. The hiadaptive mode raises the CPU frequency twice as fast as adaptive, it drops the CPU frequency 4 times slower, prefers twice lower CPU load and has an additional delay before leaving the highest frequency after the period of maximum load.

The stat(1) utility now displays an octal representation of suid, sgid and sticky bits when the -x flag is specified.

The strndup(3) function has been added.

The wc(1) utility now supports an -L flag to output the number of characters in the longest input line.

A bug in the rpc.yppasswdd(8) program, which causes it to leave a zombie process when a password or default shell is changed, has been fixed.

2.4 Contributed Software

ISC BIND has been updated to version 9.4.3-P2.

The timezone database has been updated from the tzdata2008h release to the tzdata2009f release.

2.5 Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure

A bug in the pkg_create(1) utility, which prevents the -n flag from working has been fixed.

The FreeBSD Ports Collection now supports multiple make(1) jobs in some supported ports. This is automatically enabled when a port is marked as MAKE_JOBS_SAFE and improves CPU utilization at the build stage by passing an option -jX to the top level Makefile from the vendor. The number X is set to the number of CPUs by default, and can be set by users via a make(1) variable MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER. For more details, see ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk.

2.6 Release Engineering and Integration

The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment (x11/gnome2) has been updated from 2.22 to 2.26.

The supported version of the KDE desktop environment has been updated from 3.5.10 (x11/kde3) to 4.2.2 (x11/kde4).