FreeBSD 9.1

v9.0 [01-25-12]

• The FreeBSD kernel now supports Capsicum Capability Mode. Capsicum is a set of features for sandboxing support, using a capability model in which the capabilities are file descriptors. Two new kernel options CAPABILITIES and CAPABILITY_MODE have been added to the GENERIC kernel. For more information about Capsicum, see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/.[r219129]
• The hhook(9) (Helper Hook) and khelp(9) (Kernel Helpers) KPIs have been implemented. These are a kind of superset of pfil(9) framework for more general use in the kernel. The hhook(9) KPI provides a way for kernel subsystems to export hook points that khelp(9) modules can hook to provide enhanced or new functionality to the kernel. The khelp(9) KPI provides a framework for managing khelp(9) modules, which indirectly use the hhook(9) KPI to register their hook functions with hook points of interest within the kernel. These allow a structured way to dynamically extend the kernel at runtime in an ABI preserving manner.[r216758, r216615]
• A new resource accounting API has been implemented. It can keep per-process, per-jail, and per-loginclass resource accounting information. Note that this is not built nor installed by default. To build and install them, specify options RACCT in the kernel configuration file and rebuild the base system as described in the FreeBSD Handbook.[r220137]
• A new resource-limiting API has been implemented. It works in conjunction with the RACCT resource accounting implementation and takes user-configurable actions based on the set of rules it maintains and the current resource usage. The rctl(8) utility has been added to manage the rules in userland. Note that this is not built nor installed by default. To build and install them, specify options RCTL in the kernel configuration file and rebuild the base system as described in the FreeBSD Handbook.[r220163]
• [powerpc] FreeBSD/powerpc now supports Sony Playstation 3 using the OtherOS feature available on firmwares 3.15 and earlier.[r217044]
• [amd64, i386] The FreeBSD usb(4) subsystem now supports USB 3.0 by default.[r223098]
• The FreeBSD usb(4) subsystem now supports USB packet filter. This allows to capture packets which go through each USB host controller. The implementation is almost based on bpf(4) code. The userland program usbdump(8) has been added.[r215649]
• A bxe(4) driver for Broadcom NetXtreme II 10GbE controllers (BCM57710, BCM57711, BCM57711E) has been added.[r219647]
• A cxgbe(4) driver for Chelsio T4 (Terminator 4) based 10Gb/1Gb adapters has been added.[r218794]
• The em(4) driver has been updated to version 7.3.2.[r219753]
• The igb(4) driver has been updated to version 2.2.5.[r223350]
• The igb(4) driver now supports Intel I350 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet controllers.[r218530]
• The ixgbe(4) driver has been updated to version 2.3.8.[r217593]
• The re(4) driver now supports RTL8168E/8111E-VL PCIe Gigabit Ethernet controllers and RTL8401E PCIe Fast Ethernet controllers.[r217498, r218760]
• A vte(4) driver for RDC R6040 Fast Ethernet controllers, which are commonly found on the Vortex86 System On a Chip, has been added.[r216829]
• A vxge(4) driver for the Neterion X3100 10GbE Server/Storage adapter has been added.[r221167]
• ipfw(8) now supports IPv6 in the fwd action.[r225044]
• ipfw(8) now supports the call and return actions. Upon the call number action, the current rule number is saved in the internal stack and ruleset processing continues with the first rule numbered number or higher. The return action takes the rule number saved to internal stack by the latest call action and returns ruleset processing to the first rule with number greater than that saved number.[r223666]
• For Infiniband support, OFED (OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution) version 1.5.3 has been imported into the base system. Note that this is not built nor installed by default. To build and install them, specify WITH_OFED=yes in /etc/src.conf and rebuild the base system as described in the FreeBSD Handbook.[r219820]
• The FreeBSD TCP/IP network stack now supports IPv4 prefixes with /31 as described in RFC 3021, “Using 31-Bit Prefixes on IPv4 Point-to-Point Links”.[r226572]
• The FreeBSD TCP/IP network stack now supports the mod_cc(9) pluggable congestion control framework. This allows TCP congestion control algorithms to be implemented as dynamically loadable kernel modules. The following kernel modules are available as of 9.0-RELEASE: cc_chd(4) for the CAIA-Hamilton-Delay algorithm, cc_cubic(4) for the CUBIC algorithm, cc_hd(4) for the Hamilton-Delay algorithm, cc_htcp(4) for the H-TCP algorithm, cc_newreno(4) for the NewReno algorithm, and cc_vegas(4) for the Vegas algorithm. The default algorithm can be set by a new sysctl(8) variable net.inet.tcp.cc.algorithm. The value must be set to one of the names listed by net.inet.tcp.cc.available, and newreno is the default set at boot time. For more detail, see the mod_cc(4) and mod_cc(9) manual pages.[r216109, r216114, r216115, r218152, r218153, r218155]
• An h_ertt(4) (Enhanced Round Trip Time) khelp(9) module has been added. This module allows per-connection, low noise estimates of the instantaneous RTT in the TCP/IP network stack with a robust implementation even in the face of delayed acknowledgments and/or TSO (TCP Segmentation Offload) being in use for a connection.[r217806]
• A new tcp(4) socket option TCP_CONGESTION has been added. This allows to select or query the congestion control algorithm that the TCP/IP network stack will use for connections on the socket.[r218912]
• The ng_netflow(4) netgraph(4) node now supports NetFlow version 9. A new export9 hook has been added for NetFlow v9 data. Note that data export can be done simultaneously in both version 5 and version 9.[r219183]
• The geom_map(4) GEOM class has been added. This allows to generate multiple geom providers based on a hard-coded layout of a device with no explicit partition table such as embedded flash storage. For more information, see the geom_map(4) manual page.[r220559]
• The graid(8) GEOM class has been added. This is a replacement of the ataraid(4) driver supporting various BIOS-based software RAID.[r219974]
• A tws(4) driver for 3ware 9750 SATA+SAS 6Gb/s RAID controllers has been added.[r226115]
• The FreeBSD Fast File System now supports softupdates journaling. It introduces a intent log into a softupdates-enabled file system which eliminates the need for background fsck(8) even on unclean shutdown. This can be enabled in a per-filesystem basis by using the -j flag of the newfs(8) utility or the -j enable option of the tunefs(8) utility. Note that the 9.0-RELEASE installer automatically enables softupdates journaling for newly-created UFS file systems.[r207141, r218726]
• The FreeBSD Fast File System now supports the TRIM command when freeing data blocks. A new flag -t in the newfs(8) and tunefs(8) utilities sets the TRIM-enable flag for a file system. The TRIM-enable flag makes the file system send a delete request to the underlying device for each freed block. The TRIM command is specified as a Data Set Management Command in the ATA8-ACS2 standard to carry the information related to deleted data blocks to a device, especially for a SSD (Solid-State Drive) for optimization.[r216796]
• The FreeBSD NFS subsystem has been updated. The new implementation supports NFS version 4 in addition to 2 and 3. The kernel options for the NFS server and client are changed from NFSSERVER and NFSCLIENT to NFSD and NFSCL. sysctl(8) variables which start with vfs.nfssrv. have been renamed to vfs.nfsd.. The NFS server now supports vfs.nfsd.server_max_nfsvers and vfs.nfsd.server_min_nfsvers sysctl(8) variables to specify the maximum and the minimum NFS version number which the server accepts. The default value is set to 3 and 2, respectively.[r221124]
• The FreeBSD ZFS subsystem has been updated to the SPA (Storage Pool Allocator, also known as zpool) version 28. It now supports data deduplication, triple parity RAIDZ (raidz3), snapshot holds, log device removal, zfs diff, zpool split, zpool import -F, and read-only zpool import.[r219089]
• An implementation of iconv() API libraries and utilities which are standardized in Single UNIX Specification has been imported. These are based on NetBSD's Citrus implementation. Note that these are not built nor installed by default. To build and install them, specify WITH_ICONV=yes in /etc/src.conf and rebuild the base system as described in the FreeBSD Handbook.[r219019]
• A readline(3) API set has been imported into libedit. This is based on NetBSD's implementation and BSD licensed utilities now use it instead of GNU libreadline.[r220370]
• The rtsold(8) and rtadvd(8) daemons now support the RDNSS and DNSSL options described in RFC 6106, “IPv6 Router Advertisement Options for DNS Configuration”. A rtadvctl(8) utility to control the rtadvd(8) daemon has been added.[r222732, r224006]
• The rtld(1) runtime linker now supports shared objects as filters in ELF shared libraries. Both standard and auxiliary filtering have been supported. The rtld(1) linker's processing of a filter defers loading a filtee until a filter symbol is referenced unless the LD_LOADFLTR environment variable is defined or a -z loadfltr option was specified when the filter was created.[r216695]
• A bug in the tftpd(8) daemon has been fixed. It had an interoperability issue when transferring a large file.[r224536]
• The utmp(5) user accounting database has been replaced by utmpx(3). User accounting utilities will now use utmpx database files exclusively. The wtmpcvt(1) utility can be used to convert wtmp files to the new format, making it possible to read them using the updated utilities.[r202188]
• The zpool(8): utility now supports a zpool labelclear command. This allows to wipe the label data from a drive that is not active in a pool.[r224171]

v8.2 [02-25-11]

• [amd64] FreeBSD/amd64 now always sets the KVA space as equal to or larger than physical memory size. This change would help to prevent a “kmem_map too small” panic which often occurs when using ZFS.[r214620]
• The FreeBSD GENERIC kernel is now compiled with KDB and KDB_TRACE options. From 8.2-RELEASE the kernel supports displaying a stack trace on panic by using stack(9) facility with no debugger backend like ddb(8). Note that this does not change the default behaviors of the GENERIC kernel on panic.[r214326]
• The FreeBSD crypto(4) framework (opencrypto) now supports XTS-AES (XEX-TCB-CTS, or XEX-based Tweaked Code Book mode with CipherText Stealing), which is defined in IEEE Std. 1619-2007.[r214254]
• [amd64] Xen HVM support in FreeBSD/amd64 kernel has been improved. For more details, see xen(4) manual page.[r215788]
• FreeBSD now fully supports GPT (GUID Partition Table). Checksums of primary header and primary partition table are verified properly now.[r213994]
• [amd64, i386] The aesni(4) driver has been added. This supports AES accelerator on Intel CPUs and accelerates AES operations for crypto(4).[r215633]
• [amd64, i386] The aibs(4) driver has been added. This supports the hardware sensors in ASUS motherboards and replaces the acpi_aiboost(4) driver.[r210476]
• The tpm(4) driver, which supports Trusted Platform Module has been added.[r215036]
• The xhci(4) driver, which supports Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) and USB 3.0, has been added.[r215944]
• The FreeBSD Linux emulation subsystem now supports the video4linux API. This requires native video4linux hardware drivers such as the ones provided by multimedia/pwcbsd and multimedia/webcamd.
• The miibus(4) has been rewritten for the generic IEEE 802.3 annex 31B full duplex flow control support. The alc(4), bge(4), bce(4), cas(4), fxp(4), gem(4), jme(4), msk(4), nfe(4), re(4), stge(4), and xl(4) drivers along with atphy(4), bmtphy(4), brgphy(4), e1000phy(4), gentbi(4), inphy(4), ip1000phy(4), jmphy(4), nsgphy(4), nsphyter(4), and rgephy(4) have been updated to support flow control via this facility.[r211379, r215881, r215890, r2105894, r216002, r216023, r216029, r216031, r216033]
• A new netgraph(4) node ng_patch(4) has been added. This performs data modification of packets passing through. Modifications are restricted to a subset of C language operations on unsigned integers of 8, 16, 32 or 64-bit size.[r209843]
• The FreeBSD TCP reassembly implementation has been improved. A long-standing accounting bug affecting SMP systems has been fixed and the net.inet.tcp.reass.maxqlen sysctl(8) variable has been retired in favor of a per-connection dynamic limit based on the receive socket buffer size. FreeBSD receivers now handle packet loss (particularly losses caused by queue overflows) significantly better than before which improves connection throughput.[r214865, r214866]
• The siftr(4), Statistical Information For TCP Research (SIFTR) kernel module has been added. This is a facility that logs a range of statistics on active TCP connections to a log file. It provides the ability to make highly granular measurements of TCP connection state, aimed at system administrators, developers and researchers.[r214859]
• The geli(8) GEOM class now uses XTS-AES mode by default.[r214405]
• The ZFS on-disk format has been updated to version 15 and various performance improvements for the ZFS have been imported from OpenSolaris.
• Userland support for the dtrace(1) subsystem has been added. This allows inspection of userland software itself and its correlation with the kernel, thus allowing a much better picture of what exactly is going on behind the scenes. The dtruss(1) utility has been added and libproc has been updated to support the facility.[r214983]
• The gpart(8) utility now supports a recover subcommand for GPT partition tables.
• The gpart(8) utility now supports GPT_ENT_ATTR_BOOTME, GPT_ENT_ATTR_BOOTONCE, and GPT_ENT_ATTR_BOOTFAILED attributes in GPT. The attribute keywords in the command line are bootme, bootonce, and bootfailed respectively.[r213994]
• The libarchive library and tar(1) utility now support LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain-Algorithm) compression format.[r213667]
• The newsyslog(8) utility now supports an -S pidfile option to override the default syslogd(8) PID file.[r211699]
• The newsyslog(8) utility now supports a special log file name for processing file inclusion. Globbing in the file name and circular dependency detection are supported. For more details, see the newsyslog.conf(5) manual page.[r215622]
• The pmcstat(8) utility now supports a file and a network socket as a top source. This allows top monitoring over TCP on a system with no local symbols, for example.[r211098]
• The tftp(1) and tftpd(8) utilities have been improved for better interoperability and they now support RFC 1350, 2347, 2348, 2349, and 3617.[r213036, r213038]
• A periodic script for zfs scrub has been added. For more details, see the periodic.conf(5) manual page.
• A periodic script which can be used to find installed ports' files with mismatched checksum has been added. For more details, see the periodic.conf(5) manual page.
• The sysinstall(8) utility now uses the following numbers for default and minimum partition sizes: 1GB for /, 4GB for /var, and 1GB for /tmp.[r211007]
• The ACPI-CA has been updated to 20101013.
• The ee(1) program has been updated to version 1.5.2.[r214287]
• ISC BIND has been updated to version 9.6-ESV-R3.
• netcat has been updated to version 4.8.
• OpenSSL has been updated to version 0.9.8q.
• The timezone database has been updated to the tzdata2010o release.
• The xz has been updated from snapshot as of 12 April 2010 to 5.0.0 release
• The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment (x11/gnome2) has been updated to 2.32.1.
• The supported version of the KDE desktop environment (x11/kde4) has been updated to 4.5.5.

v8.1 [07-26-10]

• [powerpc] FreeBSD now supports SMP in PowerPC G5 systems. Note that SMP support on FreeBSD/powerpc is disabled by default in GENERIC kernel.
• [sparc64] FreeBSD now supports UltraSPARC IV, IV+, and SPARC64 V CPUs.
• The ZFS zpool version has been updated to 14. The zfsloader has been added. This is a separate zfs(8) enabled loader. Note that a ZFS bootcode (zfsboot or gptzfsboot) need to be installed to use this new loader.
• The bwn(4) driver for Broadcom BCM43xx chipsets has been added.
• The run(4) driver for Ralink RT2700U/RT2800U/RT3000U USB 802.11agn devices has been added.
• The sge(4) driver for Silicon Integrated Systems SiS190/191 Fast/Gigabit Ethernet has been added. This supports TSO and TSO over VLAN.
• The uhso(4) driver for Option HSDPA USB devices has been added. A new uhsoctl(1) userland utility can be used to initiate and close the WAN connection.
• The urtw(4) driver has been improved and now supports RTL8187B-based devices.
• The ipfw(4) subsystem including dummynet(4) has been improved.
• The pfil(9) framework for packet filtering in FreeBSD kernel now supports separate packet filtering instances like ipfw(4) for each VIMAGE jail.
• The vlan(4) pseudo interface now supports TSO (TCP Segmentation Offloading). The capability flag is named as IFCAP_VLAN_HWTSO and it is separated from IFCAP_VLAN_HWTAGGING. The age(4), alc(4), ale(4), bce(4), bge(4), cxgb(4), jme(4), re(4), and mxge(4) driver support this feature.
• The vlan(4) pseudo interface for IEEE 802.1Q VLAN now ignore renaming of the parent's interface name. The configured VLAN interfaces continue to work with the new name while previously the configurations were removed as the renaming happens.
• The HAST (Highly Available STorage) framework has been added. This is a framework to allow transparently storing data on two physically separated machines connected over the TCP/IP network. HAST works in Primary-Secondary (Master-Backup, Master-Slave) configuration, which means that only one of the cluster nodes can be active at any given time. Only Primary node is able to handle I/O requests to HAST-managed devices. Currently HAST is limited to two cluster nodes in total.
• FreeBSD cam(3) SCSI framework has been improved and a new kernel option option ATA_CAM has been added. This turns ata(4) controller drivers into cam(4) interface modules. When enabled, this option deprecates all ata(4) peripheral drivers and interfaces such as ad and acd, and allows cam(4) drivers ada, and cd and interfaces to be natively used instead. Note that this is not enabled by default in the GENERIC kernel.
• The mvs(4) CAM ATA driver for Marvell 88SX50XX/88SX60XX/88SX70XX/SoC SATA controllers has been added. This driver supports same hardware as the ata(4) driver does, but provides many additional features, such as NCQ and PMP.
• The liblzma library for LZMA2 lossless data compression algorithm and the userland utilities xz(1), xzdec(1), lzma(1), and lzmainfo(1). has been imported.
• The ACPI-CA has been updated to 20100304.
• ISC BIND has been updated to version 9.6.2-P2.
• OpenSSH has been updated from version 5.1p1 to version 5.4p1.
• OpenSSL has been updated to version 0.9.8n.
• sendmail has been updated 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 4.4.3.

v8.0 [11-27-09]

• A new virtualization container named “vimage” has been implemented. This is a jail with a virtualized instance of the FreeBSD network stack and can be created by using jail(8) command.
• The FreeBSD netisr framework has been reimplemented for parallel threading support. This is a kernel network dispatch interface which allows device drivers (and other packet sources) to direct packets to protocols for directly dispatched or deferred processing. The new implementation supports up to one netisr thread per CPU, and several benchmarks on SMP machines show substantial performance improvement over the previous version.
• The FreeBSD TTY layer has been replaced with a new one which has better support for SMP and robust resource handling. A tty now has own mutex and it is expected to improve scalability when compared to the old implementation based on the Giant lock.
• [amd64, i386] The FreeBSD Linux emulation layer has been updated to version 2.6.16 and the default Linux infrastructure port is now emulators/linux_base-f10 (Fedora 10).
• The FreeBSD GENERIC kernel now includes Trusted BSD MAC (Mandatory Access Control) support. No MAC policy module is loaded by default.
• The FreeBSD USB subsystem has been reimplemented to support modern devices and better SMP scalability. The new implementation includes Giant-lock-free device drivers, a Linux compatibility layer, usbconfig(8) utility, full support for split transaction and isochronous transaction, and so on.
• The FreeBSD CAM SCSI subsystem ( cam(4)) now includes experimental support for ATA/SATA/AHCI-compliant devices.
• The shared vnode locking for pathname lookups in the VFS(9) subsystem has been improved.
• 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.
• The FreeBSD NFS subsystem now supports RPCSEC_GSS authentication on both the client and server.
• The FreeBSD NFS subsystem now includes a new, experimental implementation with support for NFSv2, NFSv3, and NFSv4.
• The wireless network support layer (net80211) now supports multiple BSS instances on the supported network devices.
• The FreeBSD L2 address translation table has been reimplemented to reduce lock contention on parallel processing and simplify the routing logic.
• The IGMPv3 and SSM (Source-Specific Multicast) including IPv6 SSM and MLDv2 have been added.
• The ipsec(4) subsystem now supports NAT-Traversal (RFC 3948).
• The GCC stack protection (also known as ProPolice) has been enabled in the FreeBSD base system.
• The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment (x11/gnome2) has been updated to 2.26.3.
• The supported version of the KDE desktop environment (x11/kde4) has been updated to 4.3.1.

v7.2 [09-10-09]

• [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.
• [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.
• [sparc64] The FreeBSD now supports Ultra SPARC III (Cheetah) processor family.
• [i386] The boot(8) BTX loader has been improved. This fixes several boot issues on recent machines reported for 7.1-RELEASE and before.
• A bug in the ciss(4) driver which caused low “max device openings” count and led to poor performance has been fixed.
• The sdhci(4) driver has been added. This supports PCI devices with class 8 and subclass 5 according to the SD Host Controller Specification.
• Various network interface drivers have been improved, including ae(4), ath_hal(4), axe(4), bce(4), cxgb(4), fxp(4), igb(4), jme(4), msk(4), mxge(4), nfe(4), re(4), rl(4), sis(4), and txp(4).
• 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 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.