FreeBSD Changelog

What's new in FreeBSD 8.4

Jun 7, 2013
  • Gnome version 2.32.1, KDE version 4.10.1
  • Feature flags 5000 version of the ZFS filesystem.
  • Support for all shipping LSI storage controllers.

New in FreeBSD 8.4 RC3 (May 9, 2013)

  • Fix a bug that allows NFS clients to issue READDIR on files
  • Update sendmail to 8.14.7
  • Fix rtld(1) $ORIGIN length
  • Fix randomly-changing default routes

New in FreeBSD 8.3 (Apr 18, 2012)

  • usb(4) now supports the USB packet filter
  • TCP/IP stack now supports the mod_cc(9) pluggable congestion control framework
  • graid(8) GEOM class added to support various BIOS-based software RAID controllers (replacement for ataraid(4))
  • ZFS subsystem updated to SPA version 28
  • Gnome version 2.32.1, KDE version 4.7.4

New in FreeBSD 7.3 (Mar 24, 2010)

  • The ZFS file system has been updated to version 13. The changes include ZFS operations by a regular user, L2ARC, ZFS Intent Log on separated disks (slog), sparse volumes, and so on.
  • A lock handling error has been fixed in interaction between malloc(3) implementation and threading library.
  • A deadlock in the sched_ule(4) scheduler has been fixed.
  • A new sysctl variable security.bsd.map_at_zero has been added and set to 1 (allow) by default. This controls whether FreeBSD allows to map an object at the address 0, which is part of the user-controlled portion of the virtual address space. Disabling this has some effect on preventing an attack which injects malicious code into that location and triggers a NULL pointer dereference in the kernel.
  • A new boot loader gptzfsboot, which supports GPT and ZFS has been added. zfsloader, the final boot loader similar to loader(8) which supports ZFS has been added.
  • [amd64, i386] CPU cache flushing has been optimized when changing caching attributes of pages by doing nothing for CPUs that support self-snooping and using CLFLUSH instead of a full cache invalidate when possible.
  • The amdsbwd(4) driver for AMD SB600/SB7xx watchdog timer has been added.
  • [amd64, i386] The hwpmc(4) driver for Hardware Performance Monitoring Counter support has been added.
  • DRM now supports Radeon HD 4200 (RS880), 4770 (RV740), and R6/7xx 3D, and Intel G41 chips.
  • The alc(4) driver for Atheros AR8131/AR8132 PCIe Ethernet controller has been added.
  • [sparc64] The cas(4) driver has been added to provide support for Sun Cassini/Cassini+ and National Semiconductor DP83065 Saturn Gigabit Ethernet devices.
  • A userland utility mfiutil(8) for the mfi(4) devices has been added.
  • A userland utility mptutil(8) for the mpt(4) devices has been added.
  • The yp(8) utilities now support shadow.byname and shadow.byuid maps. These requires privileged port access.
  • The service(8) command as an easy interface for the rc.d scripts has been added.
  • ISC BIND has been updated to version 9.4-ESV.
  • sendmail has been updated from version 8.14.3 to version 8.14.4.
  • The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment (x11/gnome2) has been updated to 2.28.2.
  • The supported version of the KDE desktop environment (x11/kde4) has been updated to 4.3.5.

New in FreeBSD 6.4 (Nov 29, 2008)

  • The FreeBSD Release Engineering team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE. At this time 6.4-RELEASE is expected to be the last of the 6-STABLE releases. Some of the highlights: new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client; support for the Camellia cipher; boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices with GPT-enabled BIOSes; DVD install ISO images for amd64 and i386; KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3; updates for BIND, Sendmail, OpenPAM, and other packages.

New in FreeBSD 6.4 RC2 (Nov 5, 2008)

  • FreeBSD 6.4-RC2 should be the last of the public test builds for the FreeBSD 6.4 release cycle. Unless a big show-stopper is found from this round of testing we should begin the 6.4-RELEASE builds in about a week and a half. We encourage you to test out 6.4-RC2 and report any problems by submitting PRs or via email to the freebsd-stable list. One of the things that could use some testing is the late-arriving patches to sysinstall that should eliminate the excessive disc swapping that previous releases had if things like GNOME or KDE were installed as part of the initial CD-ROM install.

New in FreeBSD 6.4 RC1 (Oct 12, 2008)

  • As the next step in the release of FreeBSD 6.4, the FreeBSD 6.4-RC1 builds are now available for testing. This is the first of an expected two release candidates. We encourage you to test out the release candidates, reporting any problems by submitting PRs or via email to the freebsd-stable list. If you would like to do a source-based update to 6.4-RC1 from an already installed machine you can update your tree to RELENG_6_4 using normal cvsup/csup methods. Note that as a somewhat inconvenient side-effect of the primary FreeBSD source repository now being in SVN the creation of the RELENG_6_4 branch in the CVS repository wound up checking in a 'new' version of every file, in some cases only changing the FBSDID.

New in FreeBSD 6.4 Beta (Sep 15, 2008)

  • The FreeBSD 7.1-BETA and 6.4-BETA builds are now available on the FreeBSD FTP mirror sites. This is the first step in the release process for FreeBSD-7.1 and FreeBSD-6.4. These sets of builds do not include pre-built packages. We encourage people to help out with the testing. Problems can be reported through Gnats or on the freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing lists. At this point we expect the 6.4-RC1 builds to start in about two weeks, and the 7.1-RC1 builds a week after that.