FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE Release Notes
The release notes for FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 9.1-STABLE development line. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.
Table of Contents
-
Upgrading from previous releases of FreeBSD
-
Upgrading using freebsd-update(8) or a source-based procedure
-
Introduction
This document contains the release notes for FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE. It describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of FreeBSD. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of FreeBSD.
This distribution of FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE is a release distribution. It can be found at http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/ or any of its mirrors. More information on obtaining this (or other) release distributions of FreeBSD can be found in the "Obtaining FreeBSD" appendix to the FreeBSD Handbook.
All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before installing FreeBSD. 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 FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE can be found on the FreeBSD Web site.
What’s New
This section describes the most user-visible new or changed features in FreeBSD since 9.0-RELEASE.
Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 9.0-RELEASE, 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 FreeBSD between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements.
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/.
| Advisory | Date | Topic |
|---|---|---|
|
3 May 2012 |
OpenSSL multiple vulnerabilities |
|
|
30 May 2012 |
Incorrect |
|
|
12 June 2012 |
Incorrect handling of zero-length RDATA fields in named(8) |
|
|
12 June 2012 |
Privilege escalation when returning from kernel |
|
|
6 August 2012 |
named(8) DNSSEC validation Denial of Service |
|
|
22 November 2012 |
Multiple Denial of Service vulnerabilities with named(8) |
|
|
22 November 2012 |
Insufficient message length validation for EAP-TLS messages |
|
|
22 November 2012 |
Linux compatibility layer input validation error |
Kernel Changes
The FreeBSD Jail subsystem now supports mounting
devfs(5),
nullfs(5), and ZFS filesystem inside a jail. New
jail(8) parameters allow.mount.devfs,
allow.mount.nullfs, and allow.mount.zfs
to control the per-jail capabilities have been added. All of them
are disabled by default.[r232728
A new
loader(8) tunable kern.eventtimer.activetick has
been added. This tunable specifies whether each hardclock tick
should be run on every active CPU or only one. By setting it to
0, the total number of interrupts can be reduced on
SMP machines. The default value is 1.[r234167
The posix_fadvise(2) system call has been implemented. This is a function similar to madvise(2) except that it operates on a file descriptor instead of a memory region.[r229723
The filemon(4) pseudo-device has been added. This allows a process to collect file operations data of its children.[r237795
The FreeBSD Linux ABI compatibility layer now supports the
linux_fadvise64() and
linux_fadvise64_64() system calls.[r231145
The default value of the
loader(8) tunable hw.memtest.tests is now
automatically set to 0 when FreeBSD is running on a
virtual machine.[r230266
A new
loader(8) tunable kern.msgbuf_show_timestamp has
been added. When it is enabled, a timestamp is added to each line
of the system message buffer. The default value is 0
(disabled).[r234075
The null(4) and zero(4) pseudo device driver now supports non-blocking mode via the fcntl(2) system call.[r230320
The FreeBSD sched_ule(4) scheduler has been improved for CPU load balancing on SMT (Simultaneous MultiThreading) CPUs. It gives a 10-15% performance improvement when the number of threads is lesser than the number of logical CPUs.[r233599
A new
sysctl(8) variable
security.bsd.unprivileged_idprio has been added. This
variable controls whether non-root users can set an idle priority
or not. This is disabled by default.[r230039
Boot Loader Changes
The
boot0cfg(8) utility now supports configuration of PXE boot via
the boot0 boot block temporarily on the next boot. The
slice number 6 or a keyword PXE can be
specified to enable PXE boot using the -s
option.[r230065
The FreeBSD
boot(8) block now supports /boot/config in
addition to /boot.config as the boot block parameter
file. When both of them exist, the former will be used.[r231287
The gptboot boot block now reads the backup GPT
header from the last LBA only when the primary GPT header and
tables are invalid. This mitigates interoperability issues with
some
geom(4) providers like MIRROR which use the last
LBA for the metadata.[r234693
The zfsboot boot block and zfsloader
support filesystems within a ZFS storage pool. In
zfsloader, the ZFS device name format is now
zfs:pool/fs and the fully qualified file
path format is
zfs:pool/fs:/path/to/file.
The zfsboot boot block accepts the kernel/loader name
in the format pool:`fs`:`path/to/file` or, as before,
pool:`path/to/file`. In the latter case a default
filesystem is used (the pool root or a filesystem with the
bootfs property). The zfsboot boot block
passes the GUIDs of the selected storage pool and dataset to
zfsloader to be used as its defaults.[r237766
# gpart create -s vtoc8 da0
# gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 10g da0
# gpart add -t freebsd-swap -s 10g da0
# gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -s 10g da0
# zpool create rpool mirror da0a da0b
# zpool set bootfs=rpool rpool
# zpool export rpool
# gpart bootcode -p /boot/zfsboot da0
# sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=0x10
# dd if=/boot/zfsloader of=/dev/da0a bs=512 oseek=1024 conv=notrunc
# dd if=/boot/zfsloader of=/dev/da0b bs=512 oseek=1024 conv=notrunc
# zpool import rpool
# cp -p /boot/zfs/zpool.cache /rpool/boot/zfs/zpool.cache
# zfs set mountpoint=/ rpoolHardware Support
The acpi_wmi(4) driver now supports attaching multiple instances.[r229858
The hwpmc(4) driver now supports software events. Simultaneous usage of software PMC and hardware PMC is allowed.[r236238
The pcf8563(4) driver for the NXP (Philips) PCF8563 RTC has been added.[r236078
The following
sysctl(8) variables have been added: kern.proc.env
for environment strings, kern.proc.auxv for ELF
auxiliary vectors from a process’s stack,
kern.proc.groups for process groups,
kern.proc.rlimit for process resource limits,
kern.proc.ps_strings for the ps_strings location, and
kern.proc.osrel for the osreldate of the process’s
binary.[r230754,
r233950
The usb(4) driver now handles suspend and resume correctly with no need to reload the kernel module.[r229100, r229369
The viawd(4) driver, which supports the watchdog timer found in VIA south bridges (VT8251, CX700, VX800, VX855, VX900), has been added.[r229927
The wbwd(4) driver, which supports the watchdog timer found in Winbond Super I/O chips, has been added.[r235926
Multimedia Support
The drm2(4) Intel GPU driver, which supports GEM and KMS and works with new generations of GPUs such as IronLake, SandyBridge, and IvyBridge, has been added. The agp(4) driver now supports SandyBridge and IvyBridge CPU northbridges.[r236926, r236927, r239965
The snd_hda(4) driver has been updated. It now supports and provides HDMI, new volume control, automatic recording source selection, runtime reconfiguration, more then 4 PCM devices on a controller, multichannel recording, additional playback/record streams, higher bandwidth, and more informative device names.[r232798
The snd_hdspe(4) driver has been added. This supports RME HDSPe AIO and RayDAT sound cards.[r233165
GPL-licensed headers in the
snd_emu10kx(4),
snd_maestro3(4), and
snd_csa(4) drivers have been replaced with BSD-licensed one.
These drivers are now fully BSD-licensed and included in the
GENERIC kernel on FreeBSD/amd64 and
FreeBSD/i386.[r230964,
r230985,
r231047,
r235769
Network Interface Support
A bug in the ae(4) driver which could prevent it from working under certain conditions has been fixed.[r229520
The axe(4) driver now supports TX/RX checksum offloading support for the ASIX AX88772B controller.[r229106
The bce(4) driver has been improved:
-
Unnecessary link up/down has been eliminated.[r229864
-
A bug has been fixed which could prevent IPMI from working when the interface was marked as down.[r236216
-
It now supports remote PHYs, which allow the controller to perform MDIO type accesses to a remote transceiver by using message pages defined through MRBE (MultiRate Backplane Ethernet). This is found on machines such as the Dell PowerEdge M610 Blade.[r235818
The bge(4) and brgphy(4) drivers have been improved:
-
A bug which could prevent DMA functionality from working correctly has been fixed.[r229350
-
It now works with a PCI-X BCM 5704 controller that is connected to AMD-8131 PCI-X bridge.[r233495
-
It now supports the BCM 5720 and BCM 5720C PHY, and the BCM 57780 1000BASE-T media interface.[r229357, r229867, r232134
-
It now supports a loader(8) tunable
dev.bge.N.msito control the use of MSI. The default value is1(enabled).[r231734
The
cxgbe(4) and
cxgb(4) drivers have been updated to firmware version 1.5.2.0.
They now support device configuration via a plain text
configuration file, IPv6 hardware checksumming, IPv6 TSO and LRO, a
loadfw command in the cxgbetool(8) utility which
allows installing a firmware to the card, and
sysctl(8) variables under dev.t4nex.N.misc for
various information.[r231093,
r237925
The dc(4) driver now supports NVIDIA (ULi) M5261/M5263 PCI FastEthernet controllers, which are found on the ULi M1563 South Bridge and M1689 Bridge.[r229334
The
et(4) driver now works on all platforms. A bug which could
prevent
altq(4) support from working has been fixed. A new
sysctl(8) variable under dev.et.N.stats has been
added for hardware MAC statistics.[r229711,
r229717,
r229720
The igb(4) driver has been updated to version 2.3.4. It now supports newer i210/i211 devices.[r238262
The iwn(4) driver now supports Intel Centrino Wireless-N + WiMAX 6150 and Wireless-N 100/130 series.[r233838, r235843
The
miibus(4) bus driver now supports device hints
hint.miibus.N.phymask for PHY addresses being probed.
This is useful to manually probe PHYs which do not implement basic
the register set of IEEE 802.3. Also, the
miibus(4) driver has been changed to a hinted bus, allowing to
add child devices via hints and to set their attach arguments in
addition to automatically-probed PHYs.[r230709
The nsphyter(4) driver now supports National DP83849.[r232137
The re(4) driver now supports the RTL8411 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet controller. A bug which could prevent WoL (Wake-on-LAN) from working on RTL8168E has been fixed.[r229529, r231731
The sfxge(4) driver, which supports 10Gb Ethernet adapters based on Solarflare SFC9000 family controllers, has been added.[r228100
The smcphy(4) driver now supports the Seeq Technology 80220 PHY. This is found on Adaptec AIC-6915 Starfire Ethernet controllers supported by the sf(4) driver.[r233485
The
ti(4) driver now supports the
altq(4) framework, reporting link-state changes, and
sysctl(8) variables under dev.ti.N for interrupt
moderation parameters.[r229417,
r229438
A bug in the
ti(4) driver which could prevent it from working correctly with
the PAE kernel option has been fixed.[r229441
The vge(4) driver has been updated to improve its link establishment and link-state detection.[r229540
The xnb(4) Xen Paravirtualized Backend Ethernet Driver (netback) has been updated. This is attached via the newbus framework and works properly in both HVM and PVM mode.[r231697
Network Protocols
The if_bridge(4) pseudo-interface now supports reporting link-state changes depending on the status of the member interfaces.[r236051
The table argument in the
ipfw(4) packet filter rule syntax now supports IP address,
interface name, port number, and jail ID. The following syntax is
valid:[r234597
skipto tablearg ip from any to any via table(42) inThe FreeBSD ip6(4) protocol stack has been improved in terms of its performance. Benchmarking can be found at http://people.freebsd.org/~bz/bench/.
An IPv6 default route configured via Router Advertisement messages is now reinstalled correctly when the default route is manually removed and then another RA message is received for the same route.[r230604
A bug which could return an incorrect value for the
IPV6_MULTICASE_HOPS socket option has been
fixed.[r227885
A new
sysctl(3) name NET_RT_IFLISTL has been added. This
queries the address list and works on extended and extensible
structures if_msghdrl and ifa_msghdrl
without breaking the ABI.[r231768
The netmap(4) fast packet I/O framework has been added. The em(4), man:lem(4), igb(4), and re(4) drivers now support this framework. The technical details can be found at http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/.[r231650, r235527
The FreeBSD
sctp(4) protocol stack now supports a new
sysctl(8) variable net.inet.sctp.blackhole. If
this is set to 1, no ABORT is sent back
in response to an incoming INIT. If this is set to
2, no ABORT is sent back in response to
an out-of-the-blue packet. If set to 0 (the default),
`ABORT`s are sent.[r231045
A bug which could cause a system panic when
SCTP_RECVINFO or SCTP_NXTINFO is
specified to the
getsockopt(2) system call has been fixed.[r231049
The FreeBSD
sctp(4) protocol stack now supports the
SCTP_REMOTE_UDP_ENCAPS_PORT socket option.[r231070,
r231140
The SO_PROTOCOL and SO_PROTOTYPE
socket options have been added. These return the socket protocol
number.[r232805
The TCP_KEEPINIT, TCP_KEEPIDLE,
TCP_KEEPINTVL, and TCP_KEEPCNT socket
options have been added. These allow controlling initial timeout,
idle time, idle resend interval, and idle send count on a
per-socket basis.[r232945
Disks and Storage
The
ahci(4) driver now supports a new
loader(8) tunable hw.ahci.force. This controls
whether it attempts to attach an AHCI-capable device even if it is
configured to use legacy emulation. This is enabled by
default.[r229291
The new
cam(4)-based
ata(4) driver now supports old
loader(8) tunables hw.ata.ata_dma and
hw.ata.atapi_dma, for backward compatibility.[r231251
The cam(4) driver now supports SEMB (SATA Enclosure Management Bridge) devices, which are equivalent to the SCSI SES/SAF-TE devices.[r236778
A new
sysctl(8) variable kern.cam.pmp.hide_special has
been added. This controls whether special PMP ports such as PMP
(Port MultiPlier) configuration or SEMB (SATA Enclosure Management
Bridge) will be exposed or hidden. The default value is
1 (hidden).[r236765
The ctl(4) driver, which supports cam(4) Target Layer and ctladm(8), a userland control utility, have been added. ctl(4) is a disk and processor device emulation subsystem supporting tagged queuing, SCSI task attribute, SCSI implicit command ordering, full task management, multiple ports, multiple simultaneous initiators, multiple simultaneous backing stores, mode sense/select, and error injection support.[r231772
The
cd(4) driver now supports Audio CDs in the same way as
acd(4) did. It will report a 2352-byte sector size to the
geom(4) subsystem and use the READ CD command for
reading the data. This fixes an interoperability issue with
multimedia/vlc.[r230014
The
da(4) driver now supports BIO_DELETE. To select
the method, a new
sysctl(8) variable kern.cam.da.N.delete_method has
been added for each device instance. The following values are
supported:[r236677
| Value | Method |
|---|---|
|
NONE |
no provisioning support reported by the device |
|
DISABLE |
provisioning support was disabled because of errors |
|
ZERO |
WRITE SAME (10) command to write zeroes |
|
WS10 |
WRITE SAME (10) command with UNMAP bit set |
|
WS16 |
use WRITE SAME (16) command with UNMAP bit set |
|
UNMAP |
use UNMAP command (equivalent of the ATA DSM TRIM command) |
When it was NONE, the device did not report logical
block provisioning support via respective VPD pages. One can set a
specific method for testing and it will be disabled automatically
when not supported on the device.
The MIRROR
geom(4) class now supports BIO_DELETE. This means
the TRIM command will be issued on supported devices
when deleting data.[r238500
The MULTIPATH
geom(4) class has been updated. It now supports Active/Active
mode, Active/Read mode as hybrid of Active/Active and
Active/Passive, keeping a failed path without removing the geom
provider, manual configuration without on-disk metadata, and
add, remove, fail,
restore, configure subcommands in the
gmultipath(8) utility to manage the configured paths.[r229303,
r234916
The PART_LDM geom(4) class has been added. This partition scheme has support for Logical Disk Manager, which is also known as dynamic volumes in Microsoft Windows NT. Note that JBOD, RAID0, and RAID5 volumes are not supported yet.[r234406
The PART_MBR geom(4) class now allows a primary or extended Linux swap partition to be used as the system dump device.[r230763
The RAID geom(4) class now supports disks with over 2TB capacity for the Intel metadata format.[r230244
The RAID geom(4) class now supports the DDF metadata format, which is defined in the SNIA Common RAID Disk Data Format Specification v2.0.[r235874
The UNCOMPRESS geom(4) class and the mkulzma(8) utility have been added. This class supports lzma compressed images like the UZIP geom(4) class and the mkuzip(8) utility.[r235483
A bug in the mfi(4) driver has been fixed. It could cause some inconsistencies due to missed interrupt acknowledgements and output the following log message:[r227533
mfi0: COMMAND 0xffffffXXXXXXXXXX TIMEOUT AFTER XX SECONDSThe
mfi(4) driver now supports single-message MSI, and Drake Skinny
and Thunderbolt cards. The
loader(8) tunable hw.mfi.msi has been added and it
is enabled by default.[r229611,
r234429
The mps(4) driver has been updated to version 14.00.00.01-fbsd. This now supports Integrated RAID, WarpDrive controllers, WRITE12 and READ12 for direct I/O, SCSI protection information (EEDP), Transport Level Retries (TLR) for tape drives, and LSI’s userland utility.[r230920, r231679, r237876
A bug in the mpt(4) driver has been fixed. It could attempt to attach MegaRAID cards which should be handled by the mfi(4) driver.[r232562
File Systems
The FreeBSD NFS filesystem has been improved:
-
It now supports a timeout on positive name cache entries on the client side. A new mount option
nametimeohas been added and set to60(in seconds) by default.[r233326 -
A memory leak when a ZFS volume is exported via the FreeBSD NFS server has been fixed.[r234740
-
A bug has been fixed. When a process writes to an mmap-backed file on an NFS filesystem, flushing changes to the data could fail under some circumstances such as errors due to permission mismatch, and this failure could not be detected as an error. A new sysctl(8) variable
vfs.nfs.nfs_keep_dirty_on_errorhas been added to control the behavior on the client side related to this issue. When this is set to1, the pages where a write operation failed are kept dirty. The default value is set to0.[r233730 -
The nfsv4(4) filesystem now supports a sysctl(8) variable
vfs.nfsd.disable_checkutf8. This disables the check for UTF-8 compliance in filenames. This is disabled by default. Note that enabling this may help wht some interoperability issues but results in an NFSv4 server that is not RFC 3530 compliant.[r229799
The
tmpfs(5) filesystem now supports a
sysctl(8) variable vfs.tmpfs.memory_reserved to
set the amount of required free pages when
tmpfs(5) attempts to allocate a new node.[r234849
FreeBSD’s ZFS filesystem has been updated by merging improvements from the illumos project. The following changes are made:[r229578, r232328
-
New properties,
clonesandwritten, have been added. -
The zfs(8)
sendcommand now reports an estimated size of the stream. -
The zfs(8)
destroycommand now reports an estimate of the space which would be reclaimed, when-nis specified. -
The zfs(8)
getcommand now supports the-t typeflag to specify the data type.
A simple script zfsboottest.sh has been added to
the source tree. This checks if the system is configured correctly
when using ZFS as the root filesystem. The script is located at
/usr/src/tools/tools/zfsboottest.sh and it uses the
zfsboottest binary program in the same
directory.[r227705
The binary program can be built and installed by the following command:
# cd /usr/src/tools/tools/zfsboottest
# make
# make installAfter that, the following command can be used to check the
system. poolname is the ZFS storage pool name to
boot:
# sh /usr/src/tools/tools/zfsboottest/zfsboottest.sh poolnameThe
sysctl(8) variable vfs.zfs.txg.timeout has been
changed from read-only to writable.
Userland Changes
auth.conf(5) has been removed because it was deprecated years ago.[r238481
The
camcontrol(8) utility now supports a fwdownload
subcommand for firmware update on SCSI devices from Hitachi, HP,
IBM, Plextor, Quantum, and Seagate. This subcommand will reprogram
the firmware on devices connected over an ATA/SATA
transport.[r237740
The
dhclient(8) utility now supports domain-search
(option number 119, described in RFC 3397). This allows a DHCP
server to publish a list of implicit domain suffixes used during
name lookup. If this option is specified, a search
keyword will be added to /etc/resolv.conf.[r230597
The
dump(8) utility now uses 53 characters for the device names in
/etc/dumpdates. This was previously limited to 32
characters.[r230047
The fetch(1) utility now correctly supports a percent-encoded user and password part in a URL.[r235253
The fdlopen(3) function has been implemented. This is an interface for rtld(1) to load a shared object by file descriptor.[r230410
The
fopen(3) function now supports the x (an exclusive
create-and-open mode) option in the ISO/IEC 9899:2011 and C11
standards.[r229845
A bug in the
gcc(1) compiler has been fixed. It could lead to incorrect
calculations when -ffast-math is specified.[r234023
The hastd(8) daemon now supports specifying the filename of its process ID file in hast.conf(5).[r229509
The
ifconfig(8) utility now supports a vlanhwcsum
parameter to set or reset checksum offloading capability on
VLANs.[r231221
A bug in the ifconfig(8) utility which could display an error message in a jail with no IPv6 support has been fixed.[r238872
The
ifconfig(8) utility now supports a carp state
state parameter to set the state to backup or
master forcibly.[r232486
The jail(8) utility now supports a configuration file (jail.conf(5)) for complex configurations.[r235839
The
kdump(1) utility now supports a -p pid option to
accept either a process ID or a thread ID.[r237789
The
kenv(1) utility now supports a -v flag to display
an entry in name=value format, and a -N
flag to display only the name.[r236118
The
kldload(8) utility now supports a -n flag to
ignore the error status when the specified module is already
loaded.[r233560
libedit has been updated to a NetBSD snapshot as of 28 December, 2009.[r237738
libmap.conf(5) now supports include and
includedir directives. They allow to include specified
files for the configuration.[r236523
Lock handling performance in the libthr pthread library has been improved. It now works 10 times faster especially under the condition that a mutex is heavily contested.[r234372
A new C++ stack has been imported. This consists of libcxxrt, originally developed by a FreeBSD developer under contract by PathScale and open sourced by the FreeBSD and NetBSD foundations, and libc* from the LLVM project. *libcxxrt* is a drop-in replacement for GNU *libsupc, which implements the C++ runtime support for features such as run-time type information, dynamic casting, thread-safe static initializer, and exceptions. libc* implements the {cpp}11 standard library, and will replace GNU *libstdc in a future release. In 9.1-RELEASE, libstdc* is still installed as standard and now dynamically links against *libsupc. This allows libraries linking libstdc* and *libc to both be used in the same program, to aid migration.[r235798
The
limits(1) utility now supports a -P pid option to
control limits for the specified process.[r230919
The
pciconf(8) utility now supports a -e flag to
display PCI error details in listing mode. When this is specified,
the status of any error bits in the PCI status register and
PCI-express device status register will be displayed. It also lists
any errors indicated by version 1 of PCI-express Advanced Error
Reporting (AER).[r237731
The procstat(1) utility now shows the superpage mapping flag when displaying process virtual memory mappings.[r229710
The
procstat(1) utility now supports an -e flag to
display process environment variables, an -x flag to
display ELF auxiliary vectors, and an -l flag to
display resource limits.[r230917,
r230918
A bug in the
remquo(3) functions where the quotient did not always have the
correct sign when the remainder was 0, and another bug
that the remainder and quotient were both off by a bit in certain
cases involving subnormal remainders, have been fixed. Note that
these bugs affected all platforms except amd64 and i386.[r234535
The rtld(1) run-time linker now supports GCC’s RELRO (RElocation Read-Only). This prevents the GOT (Global Offset Table) from being overwritten.[r231579
The
rtld(1) run-time linker now supports a GNU hash section
(DT_GNU_HASH), which is a replacement of optional ELF
hash section.[r235396
The setbuf(1) utility and libstdbuf library have been added. This controls the default buffering behavior of standard stdio streams.[r235139
The
top(1) utility now correctly supports per-thread I/O statistics
of ZFS in the -m io option.[r227702
The
xlocale(3) API has been implemented. This consists of
_l-suffixed versions of various standard library
functions that use the global locale, making them take an explicit
locale parameter and allowing thread-safe extended locale support.
Most of these APIs are required for IEEE Std 1003.1-2008
(POSIX.1-2008 or ISO/IEC 9945:2009) compatibility, and are required
by libc++ and recent versions of
GNOME. This implementation also supports several
extensions for compatibility with Apple
Darwin.[r235785
periodic(8) Scripts
A new variable daily_status_zfs_zpool_list_enable
has been added. It controls whether or not to list all of the ZFS
pools in periodic/daily/404.status-zfs. The default
value is YES.[r231721
The default value of
daily_scrub_zfs_default_threshold used in
periodic/daily/800.scrub-zfs is now set to 35
days.[r229381
Contributed Software
ISC BIND has been updated to version 9.8.3-P4.[r241417
The compiler-rt library, which provides low-level target-specific interfaces such as functions in libgcc, has been updated to revision 147467.[r236018
The libpcap library has been updated to 1.2.1.[r236167
libstdc++ has been updated to revision 135556
of the gcc-4_2-branch (the last LGPLv2-licensed
version).[r229551
The LLVM compiler infrastructure and clang, a C language family front-end, version 3.1 have been imported. Note that it is not used for building the FreeBSD base system by default.[r236144
The netcat utility has been updated to version
5.1.[r235971
OpenSSL has been updated to version 0.9.8x.[r237998
The tcpdump (tcpdump(1)) utility has been updated to version 4.2.1.[r236192
The timezone database has been updated to the tzdata2012a release.[r233447
The zlib library has been updated to version 1.2.7.[r237691
2.5 Release Engineering and Integration
The supported version of the KDE desktop
environment (x11/kde4)
has been updated to 4.8.4.
Upgrading from previous releases of FreeBSD
Upgrading using freebsd-update(8) or a source-based procedure
[amd64, i386] Beginning with FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE, binary
upgrades between RELEASE versions (and snapshots of the various
security branches) are supported using the
freebsd-update(8) utility. The binary upgrade procedure will
update unmodified userland utilities, as well as an unmodified
GENERIC kernel, distributed as a part of an official
FreeBSD release. The
freebsd-update(8) utility requires that the host being upgraded
have Internet connectivity.
Source-based upgrades (those based on recompiling the FreeBSD
base system from source code) from previous versions are supported
using to the instructions in /usr/src/UPDATING.
For more specific information about upgrading instructions, see http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/9.1R/installation/.
Important: Upgrading FreeBSD should, of course, only be attempted after backing up all data and configuration files.
User-visible incompatibilities
FreeBSD 9.0 and later have several incompatibilities in system configuration which you might want to know before upgrading your system. Please read this section and the Upgrading Section in 9.0-RELEASE Release Notes carefully before submitting a problem report and/or posting a question to the FreeBSD mailing lists.