&os;/&arch; &release.current; Release NotesThe &os; Project$FreeBSD$200020012002200320042005The &os; Documentation Project
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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.IntroductionThis 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 .
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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 .
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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.
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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.What's NewThis 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.Security AdvisoriesKernel ChangesA 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.Boot Loader ChangesHardware SupportMultimedia SupportNetwork Interface SupportNetwork ProtocolsDisks and StorageThe &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.File SystemsContributed SoftwareUserland ChangesThe &man.ifconfig.8; utility now supports
a 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./etc/rc.d ScriptsContributed Softwarelibpcap has been updated
to v0.9.1 (release).tcpdump has been updated
to v3.9.1 (release).Ports/Packages Collection InfrastructureRelease Engineering and IntegrationDocumentationDocumentation of existing functionality has been improved by
the addition of the following manual page:
&man.snd.t4dwave.4;.Upgrading from previous releases of &os;Upgrading &os; should, of course, only be attempted after
backing up all data and configuration
files.