The &os; Project $FreeBSD: head/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/relnotes/article.sgml 149248 2005-08-18 19:05:46Z joel $ 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 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. This document contains the release notes for &os; &release.current; on the &arch.print; hardware platform. 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.historic;, 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. A new sysctl variable kern.malloc_stats has been added. This allows to export kernel malloc statistics via a binary structure stream. A new sysctl variable vm.zone_stats has been added. This allows to export &man.uma.9; allocator statistics via a binary structure stream. The &man.mpt.4; driver has been updated to support various new features such as RAID volume and RAID member state/settings reporting, periodic volume re-synchronization status reporting, and sysctl variables for volume re-synchronization rate, volume member write cache status, and volume transaction queue depth. The &man.ifconfig.8; utility now supports a -k flag to allow printing potentially sensitive keying material to standard output. This sensitive information will not be printed by default. The &man.libmemstat.3; library has been added. This is for use by debugging and monitoring applications in tracking kernel memory statistics. It provides an abstracted interface to &man.uma.9; and &man.malloc.9; statistics, wrapped around the binary stream sysctl variables for the allocators. libpcap has been updated to v0.9.1 (release). tcpdump has been updated to v3.9.1 (release). Documentation of existing functionality has been improved by the addition of the following manual page: &man.snd.t4dwave.4;. Upgrading &os; should, of course, only be attempted after backing up all data and configuration files.