en_US.ISO8859-1/relnotes/article.xml

<articleinfo>
  <title>&os;/&arch; &release.current; Release Notes</title>

  <corpauthor>The &os; Project</corpauthor>

  <pubdate>$FreeBSD: head/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/relnotes/article.sgml 142193 2005-02-22 00:29:22Z bmah $</pubdate>

  <copyright>
    <year>2000</year>
    <year>2001</year>
    <year>2002</year>
    <year>2003</year>
    <year>2004</year>
    <year>2005</year>
    <holder role="mailto:doc@FreeBSD.org">The &os; Documentation Project</holder>
  </copyright>

  <abstract>
    <para>The release notes for &os; &release.current; contain a summary
      of the changes made to the &os; base system since &release.branch; is created.
      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.</para>
  </abstract>
</articleinfo>

<sect1 id="intro">
  <title>Introduction</title>

  <para>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;.</para>

<![ %release.type.current [

  <para>The &release.type; distribution to which these release notes
    apply represents the latest point along the &release.branch; development
    branch since &release.branch; is created.  Some pre-built, binary
    &release.type; distributions along this branch
    can be found at <ulink url="&release.url;"></ulink>.</para>

]]>

<![ %release.type.snapshot [

  <para>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;.  Some
    pre-built, binary &release.type; distributions along this branch
    can be found at <ulink url="&release.url;"></ulink>.</para>

]]>

<![ %release.type.release [

  <para>This distribution of &os; &release.current; is a
    &release.type; distribution.  It can be found at <ulink
    url="&release.url;"></ulink> or any of its mirrors.  More
    information on obtaining this (or other) &release.type;
    distributions of &os; can be found in the <ulink
    url="&url.books.handbook;/mirrors.html"><quote>Obtaining
    &os;</quote> appendix</ulink> to the <ulink
    url="&url.books.handbook;/">&os;
    Handbook</ulink>.</para>

]]>

  <para>All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before
    installing &os;.  The errata document is updated with
    <quote>late-breaking</quote> 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.</para>

</sect1>

<sect1 id="new">
  <title>What's New</title>

  <para>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.
  </para>

  <para>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.</para>

  <sect2 id="security">
    <title>Security Advisories</title>

    <para>A bug in the &man.fetch.1; utility which allows
      a malicious HTTP server to cause arbitrary portions of the client's
      memory to be overwritten, has been fixed.
      For more information, see security advisory
      <ulink url="ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-04:16.fetch.asc">FreeBSD-SA-04:16.fetch</ulink>.
      &merged;</para>

    <para>A bug in &man.procfs.5; and &man.linprocfs.5;
      which could cause a malicious local user could perform a local
      denial of service attack by causing a system panic, or the user
      could read parts of kernel memory, has been fixed.
      For more information, see security advisory
      <ulink url="ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-04:17.procfs.asc">FreeBSD-SA-04:17.procfs</ulink>.
      &merged;</para>

  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="kernel">
    <title>Kernel Changes</title>

    <para arch="i386">Support for 80386 processors (the
      <literal>I386_CPU</literal> kernel configuration option) has
      been removed.  Users running this class of CPU should use &os;
      5.<replaceable>X</replaceable> or earlier.</para>

    <para>The loader tunable <varname>debug.mpsafevm</varname> has been
      has been enabled by default.</para>

    <para>MemGuard, a kernel memory allocator designed to help detect
      <quote>tamper-after-free</quote> scenarios, has been added.
      This must be explicitly enabled via <literal>options
      DEBUG_MEMGUARD</literal>, plus small kernel modifications.  It
      is generally intended for use by kernel developers.</para>

    <para>A number of bugs have been fixed in the ULE
      scheduler. &merged;</para>

    <para>Fine-grained locking to allow much of the VFS stack to run
      without the Giant lock has been added.  It is currently enabled
      by the loader tunable (and sysctl variable)
      <varname>debug.mpsafevfs</varname>, which currently defaults to
      <literal>0</literal> (disabled).</para>

    <para arch="i386">A bug in Inter-Processor Interrupt (IPI)
      handling, which could cause SMP systems to crash under heavy
      load, has been fixed.  More details are contained in errata note
      <ulink url="ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ERRATA/notices/FreeBSD-EN-05:03.ipi.asc">FreeBSD-EN-05:03.ipi</ulink>.
      &merged;</para>

    <para>System V IPC objects (message queues, semaphores, and shared
      memory) now have support for Mandatory Access Control policies,
      notably &man.mac.biba.4;, &man.mac.mls.4;, &man.mac.stub.4;, and
      &man.mac.test.4;.</para>

    <!-- Above this line, sort kernel changes by manpage/keyword-->

    <sect3 id="boot">
      <title>Boot Loader Changes</title>

      <para arch="i386">A serial console-capable version of
	<filename>boot0</filename> has been added.  It can be written
	to a disk using &man.boot0cfg.8; and specifying
	<filename>/boot/boot0sio</filename> as the argument to the
	<option>-b</option> option.</para>

      <para arch="i386"><filename>cdboot</filename> now works around a
	BIOS problem observed on some systems when booting from USB
	CDROM drives.</para>

      <para>The <command>autoboot</command> loader command
	now supports the prompt parameter.</para>

      <!-- Above this line, order boot loader changes by keyword-->

    </sect3>

    <sect3 id="proc">
      <title>Hardware Support</title>

      <para arch="sparc64">The &man.auxio.4; driver has been to drive
	some auxiliary I/O functions found on various SBus/EBus
	&ultrasparc; models. &merged;</para>

      <para>A framework for flexible processor speed control has been
	added.  It provides methods for various drivers to control CPU
	power utilization by adjusting the processor speed.  More
	details can be found in the &man.cpufreq.4; manual page.
	Currently supported drivers include acpi_perf (ACPI CPU
	performance states), ichss (Intel SpeedStep for ICH), and
	acpi_throttle (ACPI CPU throttling).</para>

      <para arch="i386">Support for the OLDCARD subsystem has
	been removed.  The NEWCARD system is now used for all PCCARD
	device support.</para>

      <para>The pcii driver has been added to support GPIB-PCIIA IEEE-488
	cards.</para>

      <para>The &man.psm.4; driver now has improved support for
	Synaptics Touchpad users.  It now has better tracking of
	slow-speed movement and now has support for various extra
	buttons and dials.  These features can be tuned with the
	<varname>hw.psm.synaptics.<replaceable>*</replaceable></varname>
	hierarchy of sysctl variables.</para>

      <para arch="sparc64">The rtc driver has been added to support
	the MC146818-compatible clock found on some &ultrasparc; II
	and III models. &merged;</para>

      <para arch="sparc64">The &man.uart.4; driver is now enabled in
	the <filename>GENERIC</filename> kernel, and is now the
	default driver for serial ports.  The ofw_console,
	&man.sab.4;, and zs drivers are now disabled in the
	<filename>GENERIC</filename> kernel. &merged;</para>

      <para>The &man.uplcom.4; driver now supports handling of the
	<literal>CTS</literal> signal.</para>

      <sect4 id="mm">
	<title>Multimedia Support</title>

	<para arch="sparc64">The &man.snd.audiocs.4; driver has been
	  added to support the Crystal Semiconductor CS4231 audio
	  controller found on &ultrasparc;
	  workstations. &merged;</para>

	<para>The &man.uaudio.4; driver now has some added
	  functionality, including volume control on more inputs and
	  recording capability on some devices.</para>

      </sect4>

      <sect4 id="net-if">
	<title>Network Interface Support</title>

	<para>The &man.ath.4; driver has been updated to split the
	  transmit rate control algorithm into a separate module.
	  Either <literal>device ath_rate_onoe</literal> or
	  <literal>device ath_rate_amrr</literal> must be included in
	  the kernel configuration when using the &man.ath.4;
	  driver.</para>

	<para>The &man.cp.4; driver is now MPSAFE. &merged;</para>

	<para>The &man.ctau.4; driver is now MPSAFE. &merged;</para>

	<para>The &man.cx.4; driver is now MPSAFE. &merged;</para>

	<para>The &man.dc.4; driver now supports the &man.altq.4; framework.</para>

	<para>In the &man.em.4; driver, hardware support for VLAN
	  tagging is now disabled by default due to some interactions
	  between this feature and promiscuous mode. &merged;</para>

	<para>Ethernet flow control is now disabled by default in the
	  &man.fxp.4; driver, to prevent problems with a system panics
	  or is left in the kernel debugger. &merged;</para>

	<para>The &man.hme.4; driver is now MPSAFE. &merged;</para>

	<para arch="amd64">The &man.ndis.4; device driver wrapper now
	  supports &windows;/x86-64 binaries on amd64
	  systems. &merged;</para>

	<para>The &man.sf.4; driver now has support for device polling
	  and &man.altq.4;. &merged;</para>

	<para>Several programming errors in the &man.sk.4; driver have
	  been corrected.  This bug was particular to SMP systems, and
	  could cause panics, page faults, aborted SSH connections, or
	  corrupted file transfers.  More details can be found in
	  errata note
	  <ulink url="ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ERRATA/notices/FreeBSD-EN-05:02.sk.asc">FreeBSD-EN-05:02.sk</ulink>.
	  &merged;</para>

	<para>The &man.sk.4; driver now has support for &man.altq.4;.
	  This driver also now supports jumbo frames on Yukon-based
	  interfaces. &merged;</para>

	<para>Support for 802.11 devices in the &man.wlan.4; has been
	  greatly overhauled.  In addition to architectural changes,
	  it includes completed 802.11g, WPA, 802.11i, 802.1x,
	  WME/WMM, AP-side power-saving, and plugin frameworks for
	  cryptography modules, authenticators, and access control.
	  Note in particular that WEP now requires the
	  <filename>wlan_wep</filename> module to be loaded (or
	  compiled) into the kernel.</para>

      </sect4>
    </sect3>

    <sect3 id="net-proto">
      <title>Network Protocols</title>

      <para>The MTU feedback in IPv6 has been disabled when the sender writes
	data that must be fragmented.</para>

      <para>&man.ipfw.8; now supports classification and tagging
	of the &man.altq.4;, packets via a divert socket,
	and TCP data length.</para>

      <para>Ongoing work is reducing the use of the Giant lock by the
	network protocol stack and improving the locking
	strategies.</para>

      <para>The &man.sppp.4; driver now includes Frame Relay
	support. &merged;</para>

      <para>A bug in TCP that sometimes caused RST packets to
	be ignored if the receive window was zero bytes has been
	fixed. &merged;</para>

      <para>Several bugs in the TCP SACK implementation have been
	fixed. &merged;</para>

      <para>RFC 1644 T/TCP support has been removed.</para>

      <para>Random ephemeral port number allocation has led to some
        problems with port reuse at high connection rates.  This
        feature is now disabled during periods of high connection
        rates; whenever new connections are created faster than
        <varname>net.inet.ip.portrange.randomcps</varname> per second,
        port number randomization is disabled for the next
        <varname>net.inet.ip.portrange.randomtime</varname>
        seconds.  The default values for these two sysctl variables
        are <literal>10</literal> and <literal>45</literal>,
        respectively.</para>

      <para>Fine-grained locking has been applied to many of the data
	structures in the IPX/SPX protocol stack.  While not fully
	MPSAFE at this point, it is generally safe to use IPX/SPX
	without the Giant lock (in other words, the
	<varname>debug.mpsafenet</varname> sysctl variable may be set
	to <literal>1</literal>).</para>

    </sect3>

    <sect3 id="disks">
      <title>Disks and Storage</title>

      <para>The &man.amr.4; driver is now safe for use on systems
	using &man.pae.4;. &merged;</para>

      <para>The SHSEC GEOM class has been added.  It provides for the
	sharing of a secret between multiple GEOM providers.  All of
	these providers must be present in order to reveal the
	secret.  This feature is controlled by the &man.gshsec.8;
	utility.</para>

      <para>The &man.matcd.4; driver has been removed.</para>

      <para>The default SCSI boot-time probe delay in the
	<filename>GENERIC</filename> kernel has been reduced from
	fifteen seconds to five seconds.</para>

      <para arch="pc98">The &man.wd.4; driver has been removed.  The
	&man.ata.4; driver has been found to work well enough on the
	pc98 platform that there is no need for the older &man.wd.4;
	driver.</para>

      <para>Information about newly-mounted cd9660 file systems (such
	as the presence of Rockridge extensions) is now only printed
	if the kernel was booted in verbose mode.  This change was
	made to reduce the amount of (generally unnecessary) kernel
	log messages. &merged;</para>

    </sect3>

    <sect3 id="fs">
      <title>File Systems</title>

      <para>The autofs(9) file system and the userland library
	&man.libautofs.3; have been added.</para>

      <para>A kernel panic in the NFS server has been fixed.  More
	details can be found in errata note
	<ulink url="ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ERRATA/notices/FreeBSD-EN-05:01.nfs.asc">FreeBSD-EN-05:01.nfs</ulink>.
	&merged;</para>

    </sect3>

    <sect3>
      <title>Contributed Software</title>

      <para><application>ACPI-CA</application> has been updated from
	20040527 to 20041119. &merged;</para>

    </sect3>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="userland">
    <title>Userland Changes</title>

    <para>The &man.burncd.8; utility now allows commands (such as
      <command>eject</command>) to take place after fixating a
      disk.</para>

    <para>The <literal>create</literal> command of the &man.gpt.8;
      utility now supports a <option>-f</option> command-line flag to
      force creation of a GPT even when there is an MBR record on a
      disk. &merged;</para>

    <para>The &man.dump.8; utility now supports a <option>-n</option>
      flag to suppress the creation of a <filename>.snap</filename>
      directory on new file systems.  This feature is intended for use
      on memory or vnode file systems that will not require snapshot
      support.</para>

    <para>The &man.ifconfig.8; utility has been restructured.  It is
      now more modular and flexible with respect to supporting
      interface-specific functionality.  The 802.11 support has been
      updated to support recent changes to the 802.11 subsystem and
      drivers.</para>

    <para>Support for abbreviated forms of a number of &man.ipfw.8;
      options has been deprecated.  Warnings are printed to stderr
      indicated the correct full form when one of these abbreviations
      is detected.</para>

    <para>The <filename>libarchive</filename> library (as well as the
      &man.tar.1; command that uses it) now has support for reading ISO
      images (with optional RockRidge extensions) and ZIP archives
      (with <literal>deflate</literal> and <literal>none</literal>
      compression).</para>

    <para>The <literal>NO_NIS</literal> compile-time knob for userland
      has been added.  As its name implies, enabling this
      <filename>Makefile</filename> variable will cause NIS support to
      be excluded from various programs and will cause the NIS
      utilities to not be built. &merged;</para>

    <para arch="i386">The &man.mkuzip.8;, which is a non-GPL
      utility to compress file system images for use with
      <literal>GEOM_UZIP</literal> &man.geom.4; module,
      has been added.</para>

    <para>The &man.newsyslog.8; utility now supports
	a <option>-d</option> option to specify an alternate root for log files
	similar to <varname>DESTDIR</varname> in the BSD make process.
	This only affects log file paths, not config file (<option>-f</option>)
	or archive directory (<option>-a</option>) paths.</para>

    <para>The &man.ncal.1; utility now supports a <option>-m</option>
      flag to generate a calendar for a specified month in the current
      year. &merged;</para>

    <para>The <filename>libgpib</filename> library has been added to
      give userland access to GPIB devices (using the the pcii driver)
      via the
      <function>ib<replaceable>foo</replaceable></function>
      API.</para>

    <para>The &man.mknod.8; utility has been marked deprecated.
      Device nodes have been managed by the &man.devfs.5; device file
      system since &os; 5.0.</para>

    <para>For years, &os; has used <filename>Makefile</filename>
      variables of the form
      <varname>NO<replaceable>FOO</replaceable></varname> and
      <varname>NO_<replaceable>FOO</replaceable></varname>.  For
      consistency, those variables using the former naming convention
      have been converted to the
      <varname>NO_<replaceable>FOO</replaceable></varname> form.  The
      file <filename>/usr/share/mk/bsd.compat.mk</filename> has a
      complete list of these variables; it also implements some
      temporary backward compatibility for the old names.</para>

    <para>The &man.ppp.8; program now implements an
      <option>echo</option> parameter, which allows LCP ECHOs to be
      enabled independently of LQR reports.  Older versions of
      &man.ppp.8; would revert to LCP ECHO mode on negotiation
      failure.  It is now necessary to specify <command>enable
      echo</command> to get this behavior. &merged;</para>

    <para>An &man.rpmatch.3; library function has been added to check
      a string for being an affirmative or negative response in the
      current locale.</para>

    <para>The &man.telnet.1; and &man.telnetd.8; programs now support
      the <option>-S</option> option for specifying a numeric TOS
      byte.</para>

    <para>The &man.tcpdrop.8; command, which closes a selected TCP
      connection, has been added.  It was obtained from
      OpenBSD.</para>

    <para>&man.whois.1; now supports
      a <option>-k</option> flag
      for querying <hostid role="fqdn">whois.krnic.net</hostid>
      (the National Internet Development Agency of Korea)
      which hold details of IP address allocations within
      Korea. &merged;</para>

    <sect3 id="rc-scripts">
      <title><filename>/etc/rc.d</filename> Scripts</title>

      <para></para>
    </sect3>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="contrib">
    <title>Contributed Software</title>

    <para><application>FILE</application> has been updated from 4.10
      to 4.12.</para>

    <para><application>lukemftp</application> has been updated from a
      26 April 2004 snapshot from OpenBSD's sources to a snapshot as
      of 19 February 2005.</para>

    <para>A snapshot of <application>netcat</application> from OpenBSD
      as of 4 February 2005 has been added.  More information can be
      found in the &man.nc.1; manual page. &merged;</para>

    <para><application>OpenPAM</application> has been updated from the
      Eelgrass release to the Feterita release.</para>

    <para><application>OpenSSH</application> has been updated from 3.8p1
      to 3.9p1.</para>

    <para><application>sendmail</application> has been updated from
      version 8.13.1 to version 8.13.3. &merged;</para>

    <para>The timezone database has been updated from the
      <application>tzdata2004e</application> release to the
      <application>tzdata2004g</application> release. &merged;</para>

  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="ports">
    <title>Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure</title>

    <para></para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="releng">
    <title>Release Engineering and Integration</title>

    <para></para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="doc">
    <title>Documentation</title>

    <para>Manual pages in the base system have received a number of
      cleanups, both for content and presentation.  Cross-references
      are more correct and consistent, standard section headings are
      now used throughout, and markup has been cleaned up.</para>

  </sect2>
</sect1>

<sect1 id="upgrade">
  <title>Upgrading from previous releases of &os;</title>

  <para></para>

  <important>
    <para>Upgrading &os; should, of course, only be attempted after
      backing up <emphasis>all</emphasis> data and configuration
      files.</para>
  </important>
</sect1>