FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE Release Notes

The release notes for FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 10.1-STABLE development line. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.

This document contains the release notes for FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE. It describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of FreeBSD. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of FreeBSD.

This distribution of FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE is a release distribution. It can be found at http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/ or any of its mirrors. More information on obtaining this (or other) release distributions of FreeBSD can be found in the Obtaining FreeBSD' appendix to the FreeBSD Handbook.

All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before installing FreeBSD. 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 FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE can be found on the FreeBSD Web site.

This section describes the most user-visible new or changed features in FreeBSD since 10.0-RELEASE.

Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 10.0-RELEASE, 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 FreeBSD between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements.

The following security advisories have been issued since FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE:

A new sysctl(8), kern.panic_reboot_wait_time, has been added, which allows controlling how long the system will wait after panic(9) before rebooting. (r260431)

The vt(4) driver has been merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT. To enable vt(4), enter set kern.vty=vt at the loader(8) prompt during boot, or add kern.vty=vt to loader.conf(5) and reboot the system. (r262861)

Support for hwpmc(4) has been added for PowerPC® 970 class processors. (r263122)

Support for ADT7460 and ADT7467 fan controllers found in newer PowerBooks™ and iBooks™ has been added to the iicbus(4) driver. (r263197)

A panic triggered by removing a urtwn(4) device has been fixed. (r263256)

A potential deadlock in the usb(4) stack triggered by detaching USB devices that create character devices has been fixed. (r263799)

Support for AMD® Family 16h sensor devices has been added to amdtemp(4). (r263869)

The uslcom(4) driver has been updated to support 26 new devices. (r265610)

A kernel bug that inhibited proper functionality of the dev.cpu.0.freq sysctl(8) on Intel® processors with Turbo Boost™ enabled has been fixed. (r266165)

The uart(4) driver has been updated to include support for the Intel® Lynx Point KT AMT serial port. (r266436)

The radeonkms(4) driver has been updated to include 32-bit ioctl(2) support, allowing 32-bit applications to run on a 64-bit system. (r266594)

A bug that would prevent a jail(8) from setting the correct IPv4 source address with some operations that required security.jail.allow_raw_sockets has been fixed. (r266718)

The hwpmc(4) driver has been updated to support core events from the Atom™ Silvermont architecture. (r266911)

The oce(4) driver has been updated with vendor-supplied fixes for big endian support, and 20GB/s and 25GB/s link speeds. (r268046)

The FreeBSD virtual memory subsystem has been updated to implement "fast path" for the page fault handler. (r270630)

The asmc(4) driver has been updated to support the Apple® Mac Mini 3,1. (r271069)

The FreeBSD/powerpc64 default kernel configuration, GENERIC64, has been updated to enable the vt(4) console driver for the Sony Playstation 3™ platform. (r271111)

The FreeBSD/powerpc ofwfb driver, used to provide a graphics console when the vt(4) console driver is used, has been modified to work with the x11-drivers/xf86-video-scfb port. (r271116) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

Several performance enchancements to the vt(4) driver have been merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT. (r271128) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

The default stack size (KSTACK_PAGES) has been increased from 4 to 8 for the powerpc64 architecture. (r271153)

The FreeBSD/powerpc ATI driver has been updated to support enabling and disabling the Radeon 9700 backlight, found in the Apple® PowerBook™ G4. (r271205)

Hardware context support has been added to the drm/i915 driver, adding support for Mesa 9.2 and later. (r271816)

Support for Microsoft® Hyper-V has been added to FreeBSD/i386 as loadable modules, however not available in the GENERIC kernel configuration. (r259450)

The bhyve(4) hypervisor now supports soft power-off functionality via the ACPI S5 state. (r261090)

Support for FreeBSD/i386 guests has been added to bhyve(4). (r267399)

Support for virtualized XSAVE has been added to bhyve(4), allowing guest operating systems to use XSAVE and XSAVE-enabled features, such as AVX. (r267427)

The bhyve(4) hypervisor now supports booting from a zfs(8) filesystem. (r268932)

A new driver, virtio_random(4), has been added, which allows FreeBSD virtual machines to harvest entropy from the hypervisor. (r268933)

The bhyve(4) hypervisor has been synced with the version in FreeBSD-CURRENT. (r270159)

A number of enhancements have been added, and several bug fixes, including:

The WANDBOARD kernel configuration file has been added. (r259355)

Boot devices may now be specified by setting a u-boot environment variable. If a boot device is not specified, the probe mechanism will be used. To specify the boot device, set the loaderdev=device u-boot environment variable. (r265067)

The nexus(4) driver has been updated to include "Flattened Device Tree" support, replacing the fdtbus(4) driver in most cases. (r266000)

The gpioiic(4) and gpioled(4) have been merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT. (r266105)

Support for hardware floating point was added to the kernel, and enabled by default in the configuration files for all platforms that contain the required hardware.

C++ exception handling now works with GCC.

Support for SMP was added to the kernel, and enabled by default in the configuration files for all platforms that contain multi-core CPUs.

Support was added for:

An I2C driver was added for the RaspberryPi.

Drivers have been added to support TI platforms, such as BEAGLEBONE and PANDABOARD:

A kernel selection menu has been added to loader(8). If the "beastie menu" is enabled, the kernel to boot may be selected from the kernel selection menu. Additional kernels may be listed in loader.conf(5) as a comma- or space-separated list. By default, kernel and kernel.old are listed. (r262701)

The sys/boot/ sources have been rearranged, moving libstand(3) to a directory indicating the library is built as 32-bit. (r271130) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

The libstand(3) library has been updated to produce a 64-bit shared library for the FreeBSD/amd64 and FreeBSD/powerpc64 architectures. (r271135) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

Initial support for UEFI boot has been added. (r271135) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

Three new files are installed to /boot, supporting UEFI boot: (r271136) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

Serial console and null console support has been added to the UEFI boot loader. (r271880)

Support has been added to cache geli(8) passphrases during system boot. When a system is configured with multiple GEOM_ELI providers all using the same passphrase, the passphrase that is cached after the first entry is used for the subsequent GEOM_ELI provider. If the passphrase in the cache is incorrect, then a prompt for the passphrase for the next provider is displayed. (r272006)

Support for Ralink RT5370 and RT5372 chipsets has been added to the run(4) driver. (r259453)

Firmware for the run(4) driver has been updated to version 0.33. (r260120)

Support for the Ralink RT3593 chipset has been added to the run(4) driver. (r261868)

The nve(4) driver is now deprecated, and the nfe(4) driver should be used instead. (r261972)

Support for the axge(4) driver has been added. This driver supports the ASIX AX88178A and AX88179 USB ethernet adapters. The AX88178A supports USB 2.0, and the AX88179 supports USB 2.0 and 3.0. (r262137)

The urndis(4) driver has been imported from OpenBSD. (r262363)

Support for multiple transmitter/receiver queues has been added to the vmx(4) driver. (r264866)

Support for the ASUS USB-N10 Nano wireless card has been added to the urtwn(4) driver. (r265345)

Transmission checksum offloading has been disabled for the RTL8168C and RTL8168CP chipsets in the re(4) driver for TCP and UDP frames. This is due to a report of UDP datagrams with IP options generating corrupt frames. (r266212)

Preliminary support has been added to the urtwn(4) driver for the Realtek RTL8188EUS and RTL8188ETV chipsets. (r266578)

A bug in the fast receiver buffer recycle path has been fixed in the cxgbe(4) driver. (r267694)

The bundled cxgbe(4) firmware for T4 and T5 cards has been updated to version 1.11.27.0. (r267849) (Contributed / provided by Chelsio)

The em(4) driver has been updated to version 7.4.2. (r269196)

The ixgbe(4) tunables have been renamed to match their sysctl(8) counterparts: (r269975)

Be sure to update loader.conf(5) if using the old tunables before upgrading to FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE.

The if_nf10bmac(4) driver has been merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT to support the NetFPGA-10G Embedded CPU Ethernet Core. (r270061)

The cxgbe(4) driver has been updated to support netmap(4) for the T5 10G/40G cards. (r270297)

The vtnet(4) driver has been updated to support netmap(4). (r270509)

The urtwn(4) driver has been updated to support the ASUS USB-AC51 wireless card. (r270514)

The Intel® XL710 ethernet controller driver, ixlv(4), has been merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT. (r270631)

Support for the UDP-Lite protocol (RFC 3828) has been added to the IPv4 and IPv6 stacks. (r265946)

A bug in sctp(4) that would allow two listening sockets bound to the same port has been fixed. (r267771)

Kernel RPC code, which is a base of NFS server took multiple optimizations, that significantly improved its performance and SMP scalability. (Sponsored by iXsystems)

The iSCSI initiator has been updated to support redirection handling when an iSCSI device is configured with multiple IP addresses across different network interfaces. Previously, clients connecting to such iSCSI devices could require additional client-side configuration. (r269065) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

A new sysctl(8), kern.iscsi.fail_on_disconnection, has been added, which allows iSCSI clients to remove the attached disk device when the connection to the target is dropped, where previously I/O would stop until the connection is restored. (r265523) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

The iSCSI transmit code has been optimized to coalesce PDUs and avoid lock contention. (r265524) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

Several performance optimizations have been made to the iSCSI subsystem, including deferring wakeup until enough data has been received to read or write a file, reducing CPU usage and throughput performance with large I/O workloads. (r265524) (Sponsored by iXsystems)

Support for hostname- and IP-based access restriction has been added to the iSCSI ctld(8) daemon. (r263720) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

The ctld(8) daemon has been updated to allow overriding the "default" portal-group configuration. (r263725) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

The ctld(8) daemon now includes a new auth-group, "default", defaulting to deny, which is possible to override. (r263726) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

The geom(4) subsystem has been updated to support I/O direct dispatch. When safety requirements are met, it enables avoiding passing I/O requests to GEOM g_up/g_down thread, executing them directly in the caller context, avoiding CPU bottlenecks in g_up/g_down threads, plus avoid several context switches per I/O. (r260385) (Sponsored by iXsystems)

The geom(4) RAID driver has been updated to support unmapped I/O. (r260385) (Sponsored by iXsystems)

The cam(4) subsystem has been updated to support finer-grained locking, direct dispatch and multi-queue, which combined with geom(4) direct dispatch, reduces lock congestion and improves SMP scalability of the SCSI/ATA stack. (r260387) (Sponsored by iXsystems)

The geom(8) GEOM_MULTIPATH class has been updated to support automatic live partition resizing. (r260478)

The virtio_blk(4) driver has been updated to support unmapped I/O. (r260857)

The virtio_scsi(4) driver has been updated to support unmapped I/O. (r260858)

Support for LUN-based CD changers has been removed from the cd(4) driver. (r264522)

Support for BIO_DELETE has been added to zfs(8) zvol volumes. (r264732)

Support for 9th generation HP host bus adapter cards has been added to ciss(4). (r264734)

The mpr(4) device has been added, providing support for LSI Fusion-MPT 3 12Gb SCSI/SATA controllers. (r265388) (Sponsored by LSI)

A new zvol property volmode and sysctl(8) vfs.zfs.vol.mode has been added to allow switching zvol between three different ways of exposing it to a user: geom, dev and none. (r265678)

The mrsas(4) driver has been added, providing support for LSI MegaRAID SAS controllers. The mfi(4) driver will attach to the controller, by default. To enable mrsas(4) add hw.mfi.mrsas_enable=1 to /boot/loader.conf, which turns off mfi(4) device probing. (r265922) (Sponsored by LSI)

Fixed accounting of BIO_FLUSH operation in geom(8) GEOM_DISK class (r266608)

The gstat(8) utility now has an -o option, to display "other" operations, such as BIO_FLUSH. (r266610)

The mfi(4) driver has been updated to include support for unmapped I/O. (r267084)

The hpt27xx(4) driver has been updated with various vendor-supplied bug fixes. (r267457)

Support for unmapped I/O has been added to the xen(4) blkfront driver. (r270130) (Sponsored by Citrix Systems R&D)

The geom(8) label class is now aware of resized partitions. This corrects an issue where geom resize would resize the partition, but the label provider in /dev/gptid/ would not be resized. (r259328) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

The gmirror(8) utility now has a resize command, making it easier to resize the size of a mirror when all of its components have been replaced. (r260502)

Support for MegaRAID Fury cards has been added to the mfi(4) driver. (r262967)

The aacraid(4) driver has been updated to version 3.2.5. (r263024)

The GEOM_VINUM option is now able to be built both directly into the kernel or as a kldload(8) loadable module. (r265536)

The geom(8) GEOM_PART class has been updated to support automatic partition resizing. Changes to the partition size are not saved to disk until gpart commit is run, and prior to saving, can be reverted with gpart undo. (r265912)

The geom_uncompress(4) module is built by default which, similar to geom_uzip(4), provides support for compressed, read-only disk images. (r266220)

Support for the disklabel64 partitioning scheme has been added to gpart(8). (r268091)

A new sysctl(8) and loader(8) tunable, kern.geom.part.mbr.enforce_chs has been added to the geom(8) MBR partition class. When set to a non-zero value, GEOM_PART_MBR will automatically recalculate the user-specified offset and size for alignment with the disk geometry. (r270552)

Many improvements to the CAM Target Layer (CTL): (Sponsored by iXsystems)

The hptnr(4) driver has been updated to version 1.0.1. (r270810) (Contributed / provided by HighPoint)

The mrsas(4) driver has been added to the GENERIC kernel configuration on amd64 and i386 architectures. (r271234)

The vfs.zfs.zio.use_uma sysctl(8) has been re-enabled. On multi-CPU machines with enough RAM, this can easily double zfs(8) performance or reduce CPU usage in half. It was originally disabled due to memory and KVA exhaustion problem reports, which should be resolved due to several changes in the VM subsystem. (r260338)

A new flag, -R, has been added to the fsck_ffs(8) utility. When used, fsck_ffs(8) will restart itself when too many critical errors have been detected. (r260178) (Contributed / provided by Netflix)

The zfs(8) filesystem has been updated to implement "bookmarks". See zfs(8) for further details. (r263407)

The zfs(8) filesystem has been updated to allow tuning the minimum "ashift" value when creating new top-level virtual devices (vdevs). To set the minimum ashift value, for example when creating a zpool(8) on "Advanced Format" drives, set the vfs.zfs.min_auto_ashift sysctl(8) accordingly. (r266122)

The libzfs thread pool API has been imported from OpenSolaris, and adapted for FreeBSD. This change allows parallel disk scanning, which can reduce zpool(8) overall import time in some workloads. (r266612)

The restore(8) utility has been updated to prevent assertion failures when restoring a UFS filesystem dump to a ZFS filesystem by writing restored files in block sizes that are a multiple of 1024. (r269651)

Two sysctl(8)s have been added to the zfs(8) filesystem: (r269774)

The default zfs(8) ARC hash table size has been increased, and a new loader(8) tunable, vfs.zfs.arc_average_blocksize, has been added. Previously, the hash table could be too small, which would lead to long hash chains and limit performance for cached reads. The vfs.zfs.arc_average_blocksize tunable allows overriding the default block size. The previous default was 65536, and default of the new loader(8) tunable is 8192. (r269846)

The Fast File System (FFS) has been updated to support multi-threaded soft updates. Previously, soft updates were handled by a single thread, and as of this change, now have one thread per FFS mountpoint. (r270157)

The new filesystem automount facility, autofs(5), has been merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT. The new autofs(5) facility is similar to that found in other UNIX® -like operating systems, such as OS X™ and Solaris™. The autofs(5) facility uses a Sun™-compatible auto_master(5) configuration file, and is administered with the automount(8) userland utility, and the automountd(8) and autounmountd(8) daemons. (r270892) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

A new flag is added to camcontrol(8), -b, which outputs the existing buses and their parents. (r260177) (Sponsored by Netflix)

The newsyslog(8) utility has been updated to rotate files based on the actual file size instead of the blocks on disk. This matches the behavior documented in newsyslog.conf(5). (r262075)

The location of the rctl(8) configuration file can now be overridden in rc.conf(5). To use a non-default location, set rctl_rules in rc.conf(5) to the location of the file. (r262384)

The ATF test suite has been updated to version 0.20. The test suite is disabled by default in FreeBSD 10.1, and can be enabled by adding WITH_TESTS=yes to src.conf(5). (r262855)

The libucl library (Unified Configuration Library) has been merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT. (r263019)

The pkg(7) bootstrapping utility has been synced with the version in FreeBSD-CURRENT. (r263020)

The zfs(8) userland utility has been updated to include aliases for snapshot, which allows use of zfs list -t snap and zfs snap. (r263403)

The zfs(8) userland utility has been updated to include a new flag to zfs list, -p, which when specified, prints the output in a parsable format. (r263405)

The Blowfish password format implementation has been updated. Support for $2b$ has been added, allowing use of passwords greater than 256 characters long. (r263783)

The iconv(3) library has been updated to match NetBSD, providing several bug fixes. (r264497)

The date(1) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -R, which prints the date and time output as specified in RFC 2822. (r265265)

The bc(1) utility has been updated to version 1.1, in sync with the version in OpenBSD. (r265533)

The pmcstat(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -a, which when specified, produces a full stack track on the sampled points. (r265604) (Contributed / provided by Netflix)

The netstat(8) and route(8) utilities have been updated to include a shorthand equivalent to the -f inet and -f inet6 address specifiers, -4 and -6, respectively. (r265701)

The crypt(3) library now defaults to SHA512 for password hashing. (r265879)

The gvinum(8) utility has been updated to allow forceful configuration reset with the -f flag. Additionally, a bug that would prevent -f from properly creating a gvinum(8) configuration has been fixed. (r266014)

The login.conf(5) file now takes precedence over the shell-specific environment files. In particular, the PATH, BLOCKSIZE variables are commented from /usr/share/skel/dot.profile, and the path, BLOCKSIZE, and umask variables have been commented from /usr/share/skel/dot.cshrc. (r266029)

The binmiscctl(8) userland utility and related image activator features have been merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT. (r266272)

The ps(1) utility has been updated to include the -J flag, used to filter output by matching jail(8) IDs and names. Additionally, argument 0 can be used to -J to only list processes running on the host system. (r266279)

The top(1) utility has been updated to filter by jail(8) ID or name, in followup to the ps(1) change in r265229. (r266280)

The gstat(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -o. When set, gstat(8) will display statistics for operations such as BIO_FLUSH. (r266610)

The fetch(3) library has been updated to look for root SSL certificates in /usr/local/etc/ssl/ before /etc/ssl/. (r266632)

The clang(1)/llvm suite has been updated to version 3.4.1. (r266715)

The Blowfish password format has been changed to $2b$ by default. (r266816)

The amount of data collected for hwpmc(4) has been updated to work with modern processors and larger amounts of available memory. (r266888)

The pmcstat(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -l, which ends event collection after the specified number of seconds. (r266890)

The mergemaster(8) utility has been updated to avoid printing "/var/tmp/temproot disappeared" if there is nothing to compare. (r266953)

The FreeBSD installer, bsdinstall(8), has been updated to include optional geli(8)-encrypted or gmirror(8)-mirrored swap devices when installing onto a full zfs(8) filesystem. Additionally, the parent zfs(8) dataset is now configured with lz4 compression enabled. (r267056)

The default newsyslog.conf(5) now includes files in the /etc/newsyslog.conf.d/ and /usr/local/etc/newsyslog.conf.d/ directories by default for newsyslog(8). (r267113)

The realpath(1) utility has been updated to return ENOTDIR on paths components "." and ".." that are not directories, such as /dev/null/. or /dev/null/... (r267161)

A new flag, "onifconsole" has been added to /etc/ttys. This allows the system to provide a login prompt via serial console if the device is an active kernel console, otherwise it is equivalent to off. (r267236)

Support for legacy PCI devices has been removed from bhyve(8). (r267341)

The bhyve(8) userland utility has been updated to include SMBIOS support. A new flag has been added, -U, which allows specifying the UUID of the guest in the System Information structure. (r267450)

The FreeBSD Project has migrated from the GNATS bug tracking system to Bugzilla. The send-pr(1) utility used for submitting problem reports has been replaced with a stub shell script that instructs to use the Bugzilla web interface. (r267734)

The patch(1) utility has been updated to include a --dry-run flag, which is equivalent to --check and -C. (r267747)

A bug in bsdgrep(1) that would prevent patterns from being matched under certain conditions has been fixed. (r267878)

The procstat(1) utility has been updated to include two new flags, -r and -H. When -r is specified, procstat(1) will print current resource usage about the process(es). When -H is specified, procstat(1) will print information about threads rather than the process(es). (r267979)

The sed(1) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -u, which enables unbuffered output when specified. (r268019)

The mkimg(1) utility has been merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT. (r268161)

The camcontrol(8) has been updated to include a new persist command, which allows issuing SCSI PERSISTENT RESERVE IN and SCSI PERSISTENT RESERVE OUT. (r268700) (Sponsored by Spectra Logic)

The gstat(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -p, which displays only physical providers when specified. (r268791)

The kldstat(8) utility has been updated to allow -q to be specified when also specifying -n module.ko. (r268903)

The mkimg(1) utility has been updated to include support for both fixed- and dynamically-allocated images for the VHD and VMDK formats. (r269177)

The random(4) entropy collection script, /usr/libexec/save-entropy, no longer runs within jail(8) environments. (r269220)

The bhyve(8) wrapper script, /usr/share/examples/bhyve/vmrun.sh, has been synced with FreeBSD-CURRENT. (r269397)

This update includes:

The nfsd(8) server update to 4.1, adding support for RFC5661, has merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT. (r269398)

The ping6(8) utility has been updated to reset itimer when the maximum number of packets to send have been reached. This prevents ping6(8) from exiting when the interval in set to a small value and a low number of packets to send has been specified. (r269800)

The jail(8) utility has been updated to support extra ifconfig(8) arguments for the ip4.addr and ip6.addr parameters. This change allows carp(4) interfaces to be used within the jail(8). (r269805)

Support for generating and compiling USDT DTrace probes has been improved. DTrace USDT files are now handled similar to lex(1) and yacc(1) files, meaning support for handling D files as part of the build process is built into the SRCS make(1) environment variable. (r269946)

The iscsictl(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -M, which allows modifying the iSCSI session parameters without requiring the session to be removed and added back. (r269968)

The mount_nfs(8) utility has been updated to support specifying the NFS version as a key=value pair argument to the -o flag. For example, to specify NFS version 4, the syntax to use is -o vers=4. (r270043)

The devd(8) client socket type has been changed to SOCK_SEQPACKET, providing sequential packet support. (r270242) (Sponsored by Spectra Logic)

Support for the "account" facility has been added to the pam_group(8) module. (r270401)

The pathchk(1) utility has been updated to ensure bytes greater than or equal to 128 are considered non-portable. (r270890)

The zdb(8) utility is now included in the set of applications installed in the /rescue environment, making it possible to examine zfs(8) filesystems when /usr is unavailable. (r270997) (Contributed / provided by FreeNAS)

Several libc improvements have been merged from illumos™ and Apple®, providing better internationalization support and POSIX® compliance.

Support for adding empty partitions has been added to the mkimg(1) utility. (r271967)

Support for QCOW and QCOW2 disk image formats has been added to the mkimg(1) utility. (r272819)

The mkimg(1) utility has been updated to include three options used to print information about mkimg(1) itself: (r273098)

[(rc-scripts]] == /etc/rc.d Scripts

The network.subr rc(8) script has been updated to loosen the requirement of listing network aliases in numeric order. Previously, a network alias of _alias2 would not be created if _alias1 was not defined. (r264438)

The service(8) utility has been updated to check that the rc.d(8) directory exists before traversing the directory. (r268098)

A regression introduced in FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE that would prevent proper IPv6 allocation via the jail(8) rc(8) startup script has been fixed. (r259141)

The rc(8) restriction requiring mdconfig(8) devices defined in rc.conf(5) to be listed sequentially has been removed. (r264438)

The sshd(8) rc.d(8) startup script now generates ED25519 sshd(8) host keys if keys do not already exist when ssh_keygen_alg() is invoked. (r262566)

Support for vt(4) keyboard maps has been added to the syscons rc.d(8) startup script. (r271095)

Support for subdirectories within /etc/rc.conf.d/service/ has been added the rc.d(8). This allows creating separate configuration files for services such as netif, for example, where each network interface can have a separate configuration file. (r271260)

The default rc.conf(5), /etc/defaults/rc.conf, has been updated to include /usr/lib32/compat in the default ld-elf32.so.1 search path. (r272078)

The daily periodic(8) script 110.clean-tmps has been updated to avoid crossing filesystem mount boundaries when cleaning files in /tmp. (r272430)

The xz(1) utility has been updated to a post-5.0.5 snapshot. (r263285)

OpenSSH has been updated to version 6.6p1. (r264377)

The nc(1) utility has been updated to match the version in OpenBSD 5.5. (r264911)

Sendmail has been updated to 8.14.9. (r266692)

The file(1) utility and libmagic(3) library have been updated to 5.19. (r268515)

The byacc(1) parser has been updated to version 20140422. (r268899)

The lldb(1) debugging library has been updated to the r202189 snapshot. (r269024) (Sponsored by DARPA, AFRL)

The unbound(8) caching resolver and ldns have been updated to version 1.4.22. (r269257)

The "lite" version of Subversion included in the FreeBSD base system and its dependencies have been updated: (r269847)

The nvi(1) editor has been update to version 2.1.2-c80f493b038. (r270026)

The fparseln(3) library has been updated to version 1.7. (r270031)

The lukemftpd FTP server has been removed from the FreeBSD base system. (r270415)

The timezone database has been updated to version tzdata2014f. (r270817)

OpenPAM has been updated to Ourouparia (20140912). (r271947)

OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.1j. (r273399)

The pkg(8) package management utility has been updated to version 1.3.8.

The services.mkdb(8) utility has been updated to include endianness awareness, allowing the services.db database to be created as part of the release build, regardless of native- or cross-built releases. (r263028)

The release/ scripts have been updated to produce UEFI-capable and BIOS-capable CD-ROM ISOs as well as memory stick images for the FreeBSD/amd64 architecture. (r271470) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

The release/scripts/pkg-stage.sh script has been updated to include a symlink to the on-disc version of pkg(8) in the packages/ structure on the DVD installer. This allows the pkg(7) bootstrap utility to properly locate the Latest/pkg.txz package on the DVD when REPOS_DIR is set to /dist/packages/repos, eliminating the need for a network connection or explicitly providing the path to the version included on the DVD installation medium. (r271943) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

The FreeBSD Release Engineering build tools have been updated to provide support for building virtual machine disk images as part of the release build process using mkimg(1). The disk image formats currently supported include QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw formats. See release(7) for additional information. (r273101) (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

The FreeBSD Release Engineering build tools have been updated to provide support for building FreeBSD virtual machine disk images for the Microsoft® Azure cloud hosting platform. This functionality is not connected directly to the default release make(1) target, however can be invoked by specifying the vm-azure target directly. (r273199) #(Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)

[amd64,i386] Binary upgrades between RELEASE versions (and snapshots of the various security branches) are supported using the freebsd-update(8) utility. The binary upgrade procedure will update unmodified userland utilities, as well as unmodified GENERIC kernel distributed as a part of an official FreeBSD release. The freebsd-update(8) utility requires that the host being upgraded have Internet connectivity.

Source-based upgrades (those based on recompiling the FreeBSD base system from source code) from previous versions are supported, according to the instructions in /usr/src/UPDATING.