2.1 Kernel Changes

The amdpm(4) driver has been added to provide access to the system monitoring functions of the AMD 756 chipset. [MERGED]

The agp(4) driver for AGP devices has been added. [MERGED]

A new ddb(4) command show pcpu lists some of the per-CPU data.

Two new ddb(4) commands, hwatch and dhwatch, have been introduced. Analogous to watch and dwatch, they install hardware watchpoints (as opposed to software watchpoints) if supported by the architecture. [MERGED]

devfs(5), which allows entries in the /dev directory to be built automatically and supports more flexible attachment of devices, has been largely reworked. devfs(5) is now enabled by default and can be disabled by the NODEVFS kernel option.

The dgm driver has been removed in favor of the digi driver.

A new digi driver has been added to support PCI Xr-based and ISA Xem Digiboard cards. A new digictl(8) program is (mainly) used to re-initialize cards that have external port modules attached such as the PC/Xem.

An eaccess(2) system call has been added, similar to access(2) except that the former uses effective credentials rather than real credentials.

The ichsmb(4) driver for the Intel 82801AA (ICH) SMBus controller and compatibles has been added. [MERGED]

Each jail(2) environment can now run under its own securelevel.

The tunable sysctl variables for jail(2) have moved from jail.* to the security.* hierarchy. Other security-related sysctl variables have moved from kern.security.* to security.*.

The kern.maxvnodes limit now properly limits the number of vnodes in use. Previously only vnodes with no cached pages could be freed; this could allow the number of vnodes to grow without limit on large-memory machines accessing many small files. A vnlru kernel thread helps to flush and reuse vnodes. [MERGED]

The kernel message buffer is now accessible by the (machine-independent) kern.msgbuf sysctl variable; dmesg(8) no longer needs to be SGID kmem. [MERGED]

The kqueue(2) event notification facility was added to the FreeBSD kernel. This is a new interface which is able to replace poll(2)/ select(2), offering improved performance, as well as the ability to report many different types of events. Support for monitoring changes in sockets, pipes, fifos, and files are present, as well as for signals and processes. [MERGED]

A new KVA_SPACE kernel option can be used to reconfigure the size of the kernel virtual address space. [MERGED]

The labpc(4) driver has been removed due to ``bitrot''.

The loader and kernel linker now look for files named linker.hints in each directory with KLDs for a module name and version to KLD filename mapping. The new kldxref(8) utility is used to generate these files.

Linux emulation now supports the kernel functionality required by the emulators/linux_base-7 (RedHat 7.X emulation) port. [MERGED]

Linux emulation now requires options SYSVSEM in the kernel configuration. [MERGED]

lomac(4), a Low-Watermark Mandatory Access Control security facility, has been added as a kernel module. It provides a drop-in security mechanism in addition to the traditional UID-based security facilities, requiring no additional configuration from the administrator. Work on this feature was sponsored by DARPA and NAI Labs.

The maxusers kernel configuration parameter is now a boot-time tunable variable. The kernel parameters derived from maxusers are now also tunables and can be overridden at boot-time. The hz parameter is also now a tunable. [MERGED]

Specifying a value of 0 for the maxusers kernel configuration parameter will now cause an appropriate value to be calculated at boot-time (between 32 and 384, depending on the amount of memory present). This value is now the default for all GENERIC kernels. [MERGED]

The kernel configuration parameters MAXTSIZ, DFLDSIZ, MAXDSIZ, DFLSSIZ, MAXSSIZ, and SGROWSIZ are all loader tunables (kern.maxtsiz, kern.maxdfldsiz, etc.). [MERGED]

The NCPU, NAPIC, NBUS, and NINTR kernel configuration options, for configuring SMP kernels, have been removed. NCPU is now set to a maximum of 16, and the other, aforementioned options are now dynamic. [MERGED]

A nmdm(4) null-modem terminal driver has been added. [MERGED]

The O_DIRECT flag has been added to open(2) and fcntl(2). Specifying this flag for open files will attempt to minimize the cache effects of reading and writing. [MERGED]

An orm(4) device has been added to claim the option ROMs in the ISA memory I/O space, to prevent other drivers from mistakenly assigning addresses that conflict with these ROMs. [MERGED]

PECOFF (Win32 Execution file format) support has been added.

The pmc driver, which supports the power management controller of the NEC PC-98NOTE, has been added. [MERGED]

POSIX.1b Shared Memory Objects are now supported. The implementation uses regular files, but automatically enables the MAP_NOSYNC flag when they are mmap(2)-ed. [MERGED]

Replaced the PQ_*CACHE options with a single PQ_CACHESIZE option to be set to the cache size in kilobytes. The old options are still supported for backwards compatibility. [MERGED]

The puc(4) (PCI ``Universal'' Communications) driver has been added, to help connect PCI-based serial ports to the sio(4) driver. [MERGED]

The random(4) device has been rewritten to use the Yarrow algorithm. It harvests entropy from a variety of interrupt sources, including the console devices, Ethernet and point-to-point network interfaces, and mass-storage devices. Entropy from the random(4) device is now periodically saved to files in /var/db/entropy, as well as at shutdown time. The semantics of /dev/random have changed; it never blocks waiting for entropy bits but generates a stream of pseudo-random data and now behaves exactly as /dev/urandom.

A new kernel option, options REGRESSION, enables interfaces and functionality intended for use during correctness and regression testing.

The snp(4) device is no longer static and can now be compiled as a module. [MERGED]

The spic(4) driver, which provides access to the jog dial device on some Sony laptops, has been added.

The syscons(4) driver now supports keyboard-controlled pasting, by default bound to Shift-Insert.

Support for USB devices was added to the GENERIC kernel and to the installation programs to support USB devices out of the box. Note that SRM does not support USB devices at the moment, so you must still use an AT keyboard if you are not using a serial console. [MERGED]

The umodem driver for USB modems has been added. Support is provided for the 3Com 5605 and Metricom Ricochet GS wireless USB modems. [MERGED]

The uscanner(4) driver for basic USB scanner support using SANE has been added. See the SANE home page for supported scanners. The HP ScanJet 4100C, 5200C and 6300C are known to be working. [MERGED]

The USER_LDT kernel option is now activated by default.

A VESA S3 linear framebuffer driver has been added.

Write combining for crashdumps has been implemented. This feature is useful when write caching is disabled on both SCSI and IDE disks, where large memory dumps could take up to an hour to complete. [MERGED]

Extremely large swap areas (>67 GB) no longer panic the system.

The buildkernel target now gets the name of the configuration(s) to build from the KERNCONF variable, not KERNEL. It is no longer required, in some cases, for a buildworld to precede a buildkernel. (The buildworld is still required when upgrading across major releases, across binutil updates and when config(8) changes version.) [MERGED]

The out-of-swap process termination code now begins killing processes earlier to avoid deadlocks; it now also takes into account the swap space used by processes when computing the process sizes. [MERGED]

Linker sets are now self-contained; gensetdefs(8) is unnecessary and has been removed.

Numerous SMP-friendly changes have been made to the kernel's mbuf allocator.

Network device cloning has been implemented, and the gif(4) device has been modified to take advantage of it. Thus, instead of specifying how many gif(4) interfaces are available in kernel configuration files, ifconfig(8)'s create option should be used when another device instance is desired. [MERGED]

It is now possible to hardwire kernel environment variables (such as tuneables) at compile-time using config(8)'s ENV directive.

Idle zeroing of pages can be enabled with the vm.zeroidle_enable sysctl variable.

The load addresses of kernels are now exported to the symbol table and various hard-coded constants have been removed so that utilities such as ps(1) can work with kernels compiled at different addresses. [MERGED]

Coredumps of large processes (or of a large number of processes) no longer lock up the machine for long periods of time. [MERGED]

The kernel is now aware of the concept that there are smaller units of scheduling than a process (but only one thread per process is allowed at this time).

The kernel now has support for multiple low-level console devices. The new conscontrol(8) utility helps to manage the different consoles.

The kernel on the installation CDs is now separated from the mfsroot image. This permits the use of a full kernel when installing from CD on machines that support CD booting (instead of the stripped-down kernel used on floppies). [MERGED]

The system load average computation now adds some jitter to the timing of samples, in order to avoid synchronization with processes that run periodically. [MERGED]

If a debugging kernel with modules is being built (i.e. using makeoptions DEBUG=-g), the modules will now be built with debugging support as well, for completeness. A side effect of this change is that modules built and installed with debugging kernels will now occupy more space on disk than they did previously. [MERGED]

The kernel dump device can now be set via the dumpdev loader tunable. As a result, it is now possible to obtain crash dumps from panics during the late stages of kernel initialization (before the system enters into single-user mode). [MERGED]

    options DEVICE_POLLING
    options HZ=1000 # not compulsory but strongly recommended

    hw.pcic.intr_path="1"
      hw.pcic.irq="0"

    ok set hw.pcic.intr_path="1"
    ok set hw.pcic.irq="0"

    snd_maestro3_load="YES"

2.2 Security-Related Changes

sysinstall(8) now allows the user to select one of two ``security profiles'' at install-time. These profiles enable different levels of system security by enabling or disabling various system services in rc.conf(5) on new installs. [MERGED]

A bug in which malformed ELF executable images can hang the system has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-00:41). [MERGED]

A security hole in Linux emulation was fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-00:42). [MERGED]

String-handling library calls in many programs were fixed to reduce the possibility of buffer overflow-related exploits. [MERGED]

TCP now uses stronger randomness in choosing its initial sequence numbers (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-00:52). [MERGED]

Several buffer overflows in tcpdump(1) were corrected (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-00:61). [MERGED]

A security hole in top(1) was corrected (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-00:62). [MERGED]

A potential security hole caused by an off-by-one-error in gethostbyname(3) has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-00:63). [MERGED]

A potential buffer overflow in the ncurses(3) library, which could cause arbitrary code to be run from within systat(1), has been corrected (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-00:68). [MERGED]

A vulnerability in telnetd(8) that could cause it to consume large amounts of server resources has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-00:69). [MERGED]

The nat deny_incoming command in ppp(8) now works correctly (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-00:70). [MERGED]

A vulnerability in csh(1)/ tcsh(1) temporary files that could allow overwriting of arbitrary user-writable files has been closed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-00:76). [MERGED]

The ssh(1) binary is no longer SUID root by default. [MERGED]

Some fixes were applied to the Kerberos IV implementation related to environment variables, a possible buffer overrun, and overwriting ticket files. [MERGED]

telnet(1) now does a better job of sanitizing its environment. [MERGED]

Several vulnerabilities in procfs(5) were fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-00:77). [MERGED]

A bug in OpenSSH in which a server was unable to disable ssh-agent(1) or X11Forwarding was fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:01). [MERGED]

A bug in ipfw(8) and ip6fw(8) in which inbound TCP segments could incorrectly be treated as being part of an established connection has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:08). [MERGED]

A bug in crontab(1) that could allow users to read any file on the system in valid crontab(5) syntax has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:09). [MERGED]

A vulnerability in inetd(8) that could allow read-access to the initial 16 bytes of wheel-accessible files has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:11). [MERGED]

A bug in periodic(8) that used insecure temporary files has been corrected (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:12). [MERGED]

A bug in sort(1) in which an attacker might be able to cause it to abort processing has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:13). [MERGED]

OpenSSH now has code to prevent (instead of just mitigating through connection limits) an attack that can lead to guessing the server key (not host key) by regenerating the server key when an RSA failure is detected (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:24). [MERGED]

A number of programs have had output formatting strings corrected so as to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities. [MERGED]

A number of programs that use temporary files now do so more securely. [MERGED]

A bug in ICMP that could cause an attacker to disrupt TCP and UDP ``sessions'' has been corrected. [MERGED]

A bug in timed(8), which caused it to crash if send certain malformed packets, has been corrected (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:28). [MERGED]

A bug in rwhod(8), which caused it to crash if send certain malformed packets, has been corrected (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:29). [MERGED]

A security hole in FreeBSD's FFS and EXT2FS implementations, which allowed a race condition that could cause users to have unauthorized access to data, has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:30). [MERGED]

A remotely-exploitable vulnerability in ntpd(8) has been closed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:31). [MERGED]

A security hole in IPFilter's fragment cache has been closed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:32). [MERGED]

Buffer overflows in glob(3), which could cause arbitrary code to be run on an FTP server, have been closed. In addition, to prevent some forms of DOS attacks, glob(3) allows specification of a limit on the number of pathname matches it will return. ftpd(8) now uses this feature (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:33). [MERGED]

Initial sequence numbers in TCP are more thoroughly randomized (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:39). Due to some possible compatibility issues, the behavior of this security fix can be enabled or disabled via the net.inet.tcp.tcp_seq_genscheme sysctl variable.[MERGED]

A vulnerability in the fts(3) routines (used by applications for recursively traversing a filesystem) could allow a program to operate on files outside the intended directory hierarchy. This bug has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:40). [MERGED]

FreeBSD's TCP implementation has been made more resistant to SYN floods, by eliminating the RST segment normally sent when removing a connection from the listen queue.

OpenSSH now switches to the user's UID before attempting to unlink the authentication forwarding file, nullifying the effects of a race.

A flaw allowed some signal handlers to remain in effect in a child process after being exec-ed from its parent. This allowed an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of a setuid binary. This flaw has been corrected (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:42). [MERGED]

A remote buffer overflow in tcpdump(1) has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:48). [MERGED]

A remote buffer overflow in telnetd(8) has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:49). [MERGED]

The new net.inet.ip.maxfragpackets and net.inet.ip6.maxfragpackets sysctl variables limit the amount of memory that can be consumed by IPv4 and IPv6 packet fragments, which defends against some denial of service attacks (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:52). [MERGED]

All services in inetd.conf are now disabled by default for new installations. sysinstall(8) gives the option of enabling or disabling inetd(8) on new installations, as well as editing inetd.conf. [MERGED]

A flaw in the implementation of the ipfw(8) me rules on point-to-point links has been corrected. Formerly, me filter rules would match the remote IP address of a point-to-point interface in addition to the intended local IP address (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:53). [MERGED]

A vulnerability in procfs(5), which could allow a process to read sensitive information from another process's memory space, has been closed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:55). [MERGED]

The PARANOID hostname checking in tcp_wrappers now works as advertised (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:56). [MERGED]

A local root exploit in sendmail(8) has been closed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:57). [MERGED]

A remote root vulnerability in lpd(8) has been closed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:58). [MERGED]

A race condition in rmuser(8) that briefly exposed a world-readable /etc/master.passwd has been fixed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:59). [MERGED]

A vulnerability in UUCP has been closed (see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:62). All non-root-owned binaries in standard system paths now have the schg flag set to prevent exploit vectors when run by cron(8), by root, or by a user other then the one owning the binary. In addition, uustat(1) is now run via /etc/periodic/daily/410.status-uucp as uucp, not root. In FreeBSD -CURRENT, UUCP has since been moved to the Ports Collection and no longer a part of the base system. [MERGED]

A security hole in the form of a buffer overflow in the semop(2) system call has been closed. [MERGED]

A security hole in OpenSSH, which could allow users to execute code with arbitrary privileges if UseLogin yes was set, has been closed. Note that the default value of this setting is UseLogin no. (See security advisory FreeBSD-SA-01:63.) [MERGED]

The use of an insecure temporary directory by pkg_add(1) could permit a local attacker to modify the contents of binary packages while they were being installed. This hole has been closed. (See security advisory FreeBSD-SA-02:01.) [MERGED]

A race condition in pw(8), which could expose the contents of /etc/master.passwd, has been eliminated. (See security advisory FreeBSD-SA-02:02.) [MERGED]

A bug in k5su(8) could have allowed a process that had given up superuser privileges to regain them. This bug has been fixed. (See security advisory FreeBSD-SA-02:07.) [MERGED]

An ``off-by-one'' bug has been fixed in OpenSSH's multiplexing code. This bug could have allowed an authenticated remote user to cause sshd(8) to execute arbitrary code with superuser privileges, or allowed a malicious SSH server to execute arbitrary code on the client system with the privileges of the client user. (See security advisory FreeBSD-SA-02:13.) [MERGED]

A programming error in zlib could result in attempts to free memory multiple times. The malloc(3)/ free(3) routines used in FreeBSD are not vulnerable to this error, but applications receiving specially-crafted blocks of invalid compressed data could be made to function incorrectly or abort. This zlib bug has been fixed. For a workaround and solutions, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-02:18. [MERGED]

2.3 Userland Changes

If the first argument to ancontrol(8) or wicontrol(8) doesn't start with a -, it is assumed to be an interface.

apmd(8) now has the ability to monitor battery levels and execute commands based on percentage or minutes of battery life remaining via the apm_battery configuration directive. See the commented-out examples in /etc/apmd.conf for the syntax. [MERGED]

arp(8) now prints the applicable interface name for each ARP entry. [MERGED]

arp(8) now prints [fddi] or [atm] tags for addresses on interfaces of those types.

atacontrol(8) has been added to control various aspects of the ata(4) driver.

boot98cfg(8), a PC-98 boot manager installation and configuration utility, has been added. [MERGED]

burncd(8) now supports a -m option for multisession mode (the default behavior now is to close disks as single-session). A -l option to take a list of image files from a filename was also added; - can be used as a filename for stdin. [MERGED]

burncd(8) now supports Disk At Once (DAO) mode, selectable via the -d flag.

burncd(8) now has the ability to write VCDs/SVCDs.

c89(1) has been converted from a shell script to a binary executable, fixing some minor bugs. [MERGED]

A minimalized version of camcontrol(8) is now available on the installation floppy. This allows it to rescan for devices that have been connected after booting, or to show the devices attached to SCSI busses (e. g. from within the ``emergency holographic shell''). [MERGED]

cat(1) now has the ability to read from UNIX-domain sockets. [MERGED]

cdcontrol(1) now supports a cdid command, which calculates and displays the CD serial number, using the same algorithm used by the CDDB database. [MERGED]

cdcontrol(1) now uses the CDROM environment variable to pick a default device. [MERGED]

cdcontrol(1) now supports next and prev commands to skip forwards or backwards a specified number of tracks while playing an audio CD. [MERGED]

chflags(1) has moved from /usr/bin to /bin.

chio(1) now has the ability to specify elements by volume tag instead of by their physical location as well as the ability to return an element to its previous location. [MERGED]

chmod(1) now supports a -h for changing the mode of a symbolic link.

chown(8) now correctly follows symbolic links named as command line arguments if run without -R. [MERGED]

chown(8) no longer takes . as a user/group delimeter. This change was made to support usernames containing a ..

Use of the CSMG_* macros no longer require inclusion of <sys/param.h>

col(1) now takes a -p flag to force unknown control sequences to be passed through unchanged. [MERGED]

The compat3x distribution has been updated to include libraries present in FreeBSD 3.5.1-RELEASE. [MERGED]

A compat4x distribution has been added for compatibility with FreeBSD 4-STABLE.

config(8) is now better about converting various warnings that should have been errors into actual fatal errors with an exit code. This ensures that make buildkernel doesn't quietly ignore them and build a bogus kernel without a human to read the errors. [MERGED]

A number of buffer overflows in config(8) have been fixed. [MERGED]

ctags(1) no longer creates a corrupt tags file if the source file used // (C++-style) comments. [MERGED]

The daemon(8) program, a command-line interface to daemon(3), has been added. It detaches itself from its controlling terminal and executes a program specified on the command line. This allows the user to run an arbitrary program as if it were written to be a daemon.

devinfo, a simple tool to print the device tree and resource usage by devices, has been added.

df(1) now takes a -l option to only display information about locally-mounted filesystems. [MERGED]

disklabel(8) now supports partition sizes expressed in kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes, in addition to sectors. [MERGED]

dmesg(8) now has a -a option to show the entire message buffer, including syslogd(8) records and /dev/console output. [MERGED]

du(1) now takes a -I command-line flag to ignore/skip files and subdirectories matching a specified shell-glob mask. [MERGED]

dump(8) now supports inheritance of the nodump flag down a hierarchy. [MERGED]

The -T option to dump(8) no longer swallows an extra argument. [MERGED]

dump(8) has a new -D option, allowing the path to the /etc/dumpdates file to be changed. [MERGED]

dump(8) now supplies progress information in its process title, useful for monitoring automated backups. [MERGED]

dump(8) now supports a new -S to allow it to just print out the dump size estimates and exit.

edquota(8) now takes a -f option to allow limiting the prototype quota distribution (specified with -p) to a single filesystem. [MERGED]

/etc/rc.firewall and /etc/rc.firewall6 will no longer add their own hardcoded rules in the cases of a rules file in the firewall_type variable or a non-existent firewall type. (The motivation for this change is to avoid acting on assumptions about a site's firewall policies.) In addition, the closed firewall type now works as documented in the rc.firewall(8) manual page. [MERGED]

The functionality of /etc/security has been been moved into a set of scripts under the periodic(8) framework, to make local customization easier and more maintainable. These scripts now reside in /etc/periodic/security/. [MERGED]

fbtab(5) now accepts glob matching patterns for target devices, not just individual devices and directories.

fdisk(8) no longer attempts to search for a device if none has been specified on the command line, but instead tries to figure out the default device name from the root device.

fdread(1), a program to read data from floppy disks, has been added. It is a counterpart to fdwrite(1) and is designed to provide a means of recovering at least some data from bad media, and to obviate for a complex invocation of dd(1).

find(1) now takes the -empty flag, which returns true if a file or directory is empty. [MERGED]

find(1) now takes the -iname and -ipath primaries for case-insensitive matches, and the -regexp and -iregexp primaries for regular-expression matches. The -E flag now enables extended regular expressions. [MERGED]

find(1) now has the -anewer, -cnewer, -mnewer, -okdir, and -newer[acm][acmt] primaries for comparisons of file timestamps. The latter primaries can be specified with various units of time. [MERGED]

finger(1) now has the ability to support fingering aliases, via the finger.conf(5) file. [MERGED]

finger(1) now has support for a .pubkey file.

fmt(1) has been rewritten; the rewrite fixes a number of bugs compared to its prior behavior. [MERGED]

fmtcheck(3), a function for checking consistency of format string arguments, has been added. [MERGED]

fsck(8) wrappers have been imported; this feature provides infrastructure for fsck(8) to work on different types of filesystems (analogous to mount(8)).

The behavior of fsck(8) when dealing with various passes (a la /etc/fstab) has been modified to accommodate multiple-disk filesystems.

fsck(8) now has support for foreground (-F) and background (-B) checks. Traditionally, fsck(8) is invoked before the filesystems are mounted and all checks are done to completion at that time. If background checking is available, fsck(8) is invoked twice. It is first invoked at the traditional time, before the filesystems are mounted, with the -F flag to do checking on all the filesystems that cannot do background checking. It is then invoked a second time, after the system has completed going multiuser, with the -B flag to do checking on all the filesystems that can do background checking. Unlike the foreground checking, the background checking is started asynchronously so that other system activity can proceed even on the filesystems that are being checked. Boot-time enabling of this feature is controlled by the background_fsck option in rc.conf(5).

Shortly after the receipt of a SIGINFO signal (normally control-T from the controlling tty), fsck_ffs(8) will now output a line indicating the current phase number and progress information relevant to the current phase. [MERGED]

fsck_ffs(8) now supports background filesystem checks to mounted FFS filesystems with the -B option (softupdates must be enabled on these filesystems). The -F flag now determines whether a specified filesystem needs foreground checking.

A new fsck_msdosfs(8) utility has been added to check the consistency of MS-DOS filesystems. [MERGED]

ftpd(8) now supports a -r flag for read-only mode and a -E flag to disable EPSV. It also has some fixes to reduce information leakage and the ability to specify compile-time port ranges. [MERGED]

ftpd(8) now supports -o and -O options to disable the RETR command; the former for everybody, and the latter only for guest users. Coupled with -A and appropriate file permissions, these can be used to create a relatively safe anonymous FTP drop box for others to upload to.

gdb(1) now supports hardware watchpoints (using the kernel's debug register + support that has been introduced in FreeBSD 4.0). [MERGED]

The getprogname(3) and setprogname(3) library functions have been added to manipulate the name of the current program. They are used by error-reporting routines to produce consistent output. [MERGED]

gprof(1) now has a -K option to enable dynamic symbol resolution from the currently-running kernel. With this change, properly-compiled KLD modules are now able to be profiled.

growfs(8), a utility for growing FFS filesystems, has been added. ffsinfo(8), a utility for dump all the meta-information of an existing filesystem, has also been added. [MERGED]

The groups(1) and whoami(1) shell scripts are now unnecessary; their functionality has been completely folded into id(1). [MERGED]

The ibcs2(8), linux(8), osf1(8), and svr4(8) scripts, whose sole purpose was to load emulation kernel modules, have been removed. The kernel module system will automatically load them as needed to fulfill dependencies.

indent(1) has gained some new formatting options. [MERGED]

ifconfig(8) command can set the link-layer address of an interface using the lladdr parameter. [MERGED]

ifconfig(8) can now accept addresses in slash/CIDR notation. [MERGED]

ifconfig(8) now has support for setting parameters for IEEE 802.11 wireless network devices. wi(4) and an(4) devices are supported, and partial support is provided for awi(4) devices. [MERGED]

ifconfig(8) no longer displays the list of supported media by default. Instead it displays it when the -m flag is given. [MERGED]

The syntax of inetd(8)'s support for faithd(8) is now compatible with that of other BSDs. [MERGED]

The ident protocol support in inetd(8) has been cleaned up and updated. [MERGED]

inetd(8) now has the ability to manage UNIX-domain sockets. [MERGED]

install(1) has a number of new features, including the -b and -B options for backing up existing target files and the -S option for ``safe'' (atomic copy) operation. The -c (copy) flag is now the default, and the -D (debugging) flag has been withdrawn. install(1) now issues a warning if -d (create directories) and -C (copy changed files only) are used together. [MERGED]

IP Filter is now supported by the rc.conf(5) boot-time configuration and initialization. [MERGED]

ipfstat(8) now supports the -t option to turn on a top(1)-like display. [MERGED]

ipfw(8) will now avoid the display of dynamic firewall rules unless the -d flag is passed to it. The -e option lists expired dynamic rules. [MERGED]

ipfw(8) has a new feature (me) that allows for packet matching on interfaces with dynamically-changing IP addresses. [MERGED]

ipfw(8) has a new limit type of firewall rule, which limits the number of sessions between address pairs. [MERGED]

ipfw(8) filter rules can now match on the value of the IPv4 precedence field.

ip6fw(8) now has the ability to use a preprocessor and use the -q (quiet) flag when reading from a file. [MERGED]

kenv(1), a command to dump the kernel environment, has been added. [MERGED]

keyinfo(1) is now a C program, rather than a Perl script. [MERGED]

killall(1) is now a C program, rather than a Perl script. As a result, its -m option now uses the regular expression syntax of regex(3), rather than that of perl(1). [MERGED]

killall(1) now allows non-root users to kill SUID root processes that they started, the same as the Perl version did. [MERGED]

The kldconfig(8) utility has been added to make it easier to manipulate the kernel module search path. [MERGED]

last(1) now implements a -d that provides a ``snapshot'' of who was logged in at a particular date and time. [MERGED]

last(1) now supports a -y flag, which causes the year to be included in the session start time.

The lastlogin(8) utility, which prints the last login time of each user, has been imported from NetBSD. [MERGED]

ldconfig(8) now checks directory ownerships and permissions for greater security; these checks can be disabled with the -i flag. [MERGED]

ldd(1) can now be used on shared libraries, in addition to executables. [MERGED]

ldd(1) now supports a -a flag to list all the objects that are needed by each loaded object.

libc is now thread-safe by default; libc_r contains only thread functions.

libcrypt and libdescrypt have been unified to provide a configurable password authentication hash library. Both the md5 and des hash methods are provided unless the des hash is specifically compiled out. [MERGED]

libcrypt now has support for Blowfish password hashing. [MERGED]

libdisk can now do install-time configuration of the boot0 boot loader. [MERGED]

libstand now has support for filesystems containing bzip2-compressed files. [MERGED]

libstand now has support for overwriting the contents of a file on a UFS filesystem (it cannot expand or truncate files because the filesystem may be dirty or inconsistent).

The default TCP port range used by libfetch for passive FTP retrievals has changed; this affects the behavior of fetch(1), which has gained the -U option to restore the old behavior. [MERGED]

libfetch now has support for an authentication callback. [MERGED]

libfetch now has support for a HTTP_USER_AGENT environment variable. [MERGED]

libgmp has been superceded by libmp.

The functions from libposix1e have been integrated into libc.

ln(1) now takes an -i option to request user confirmation before overwriting an existing file. [MERGED]

ln(1) now takes a -h flag to avoid following a target that is a link, with a -n flag for compatibility with other implementations. [MERGED]

logger(1) can now send messages directly to a remote syslog. [MERGED]

login(1) now exports environment variables set by PAM modules. [MERGED]

lpc(8) has been improved; lpc clean is now somewhat safer, and a new lpc tclean command has been added to check to see what files would be removed by lpc clean. [MERGED]

lpd(8) now takes two new options: -c will log all connection errors to syslogd(8), while -W will allow connections from non-reserved ports. [MERGED]

lpd(8) now has some support for o-type print-file actions in its control files, which allows printing of PostScript files generated by MacOS 10.1. [MERGED]

lpr(1), lpq(1), and lpd(8) have received a few minor enhancements. [MERGED]

Catching up with most other network utilities in the base system, lpr(1), lpd(8), syslogd(8), and logger(1) are now all IPv6-capable. [MERGED]

lprm - now works for remote printer queues. [MERGED]

ls(1) can produce colorized listings with the -G flag (and appropriate terminal support). The CLICOLOR environment variable can be set to enable colorized listings by default. [MERGED]

mail(1) now takes a -E flag to avoid sending messages with empty bodies. [MERGED]

make(1) has gained the :C/// (regular expression substitution), :L (lowercase), and :U (uppercase) variable modifiers. These were added to reduce the differences between the FreeBSD and OpenBSD/NetBSD make(1) programs. [MERGED]

Bugs in make(1), among which include broken null suffix behavior, bad assumptions about current directory permissions, and potential buffer overflows, have been fixed. [MERGED]

The new CPUTYPE make.conf variable controls the compilation of processor-specific optimizations in various pieces of code such as OpenSSL. [MERGED]

The FreeBSD Makefile infrastructure now supports the WARNS directive from NetBSD. This directive controls the addition of compiler warning flags to CFLAGS in a relatively compiler-neutral manner. [MERGED]

man(1) is no longer installed SUID man, in order to reduce vulnerabilities associated with generating ``catpages'' (preformatted manual pages cached for repeated viewing). As a result, man(1) can no longer create system catpages on a regular user's behalf. It is still able to do so if the user has write permissions to the directory holding catpages (e.g. a user's own manpages) or if the running user is root.

The mdmfs(8) command has been added; it is a wrapper around mdconfig(8), disklabel(8), newfs(8), and mount(8) that mimics the command line option set of the deprecated mount_mfs(8).

mergemaster(8) now sources an /etc/mergemaster.rc file and also prompts the user to run recommended commands (such as newaliases) as needed. [MERGED]

moused(8) now takes a -a option to control mouse acceleration. [MERGED]

mtree(8) now includes support for a file that lists pathnames to be excluded when creating and verifying prototypes. This makes it easier to use mtree(8) as a part of an intrusion-detection system. [MERGED]

natd(8) now supports a -log_ipfw_denied option to log packets that cannot be re-injected because they are blocked by ipfw(8) rules. [MERGED]

The ``in use'' percentage metric displayed by netstat(1) now really reflects the percentage of network mbufs used. [MERGED]

netstat(1) now has a -W flag that tells it not to truncate addresses, even if they're too long for the column they're printed in. [MERGED]

netstat(1) now keeps track of input and output packets on a per-address basis for each interface. [MERGED]

netstat(1) now has a -z flag to reset statistics. [MERGED]

netstat(1) now has a -S flag to print address numerically but port names symbolically. [MERGED]

newfs(8) now implements write combining, which can make creation of new filesystems up to seven times faster. [MERGED]

newfs(8) now takes a -U option to enable softupdates on a new filesystem. [MERGED]

The default number of cylinders per group in newfs(8) is now computed to be the maximum allowable given the current filesystem parameters. It can be overridden with the -c option. Formerly, the default was fixed at 16. This change leads to better fsck(8) performance and reduced fragmentation. [MERGED]

The default block and fragment sizes for new filesystems created by newfs(8) are now 16384 and 2048 bytes, respectively (the old defaults were 8192 and 1024 bytes). This change generally provides increased performance, at the expense of some wasted disk space. [MERGED]

newsyslog(8) now has the ability to compress log files using bzip2(1). [MERGED]

NFS now works over IPv6.

ngctl(8) now supports a write command to send a data packet down a given hook. [MERGED]

nl(1), a line numbering filter program, has been added. [MERGED]

nsswitch support has been merged from NetBSD. By creating an nsswitch.conf(5) file, FreeBSD can be configured so that various databases such as passwd(5) and group(5) can be looked up using flat files, NIS, or Hesiod. The old hosts.conf file is no longer used.

PAM support has been added for account management and sessions.

PAM configuration is now specified by files in /etc/pam.d/, rather than a single /etc/pam.conf file. /etc/pam.d/README has more details.

A number of new PAM modules have been added.

passwd(1) and pw(8) now select the password hash algorithm at run time. See the passwd_format attribute in /etc/login.conf. [MERGED]

pax(1) has received a number of enhancements, including cpio(1) functionality, tar(1) compatibility enhancements, -z and -Z flags for gzip(1) and compress(1) functionality, and a number of bug fixes.

pciconf(8) now supports a -v option to display the vendor/device information of configured devices, in conjunction with the -l option. The default vendor/device database can be found at /usr/share/misc/pci_vendors. [MERGED]

The behavior of periodic(8) is now controlled by /etc/defaults/periodic.conf and /etc/periodic.conf. [MERGED]

ping(8) now supports a -m option to set the TTL of outgoing packets. [MERGED]

ping(8) now supports a -A option to beep when packets are lost. [MERGED]

Userland ppp(8) has received a number of updates and bug fixes. [MERGED]

ppp(8) has gained the tcpmssfixup option, which adjusts outgoing and incoming TCP SYN packets so that the maximum receive segment size is no larger than allowed by the interface MTU. [MERGED]

ppp(8) now supports IPv6.

pppd(8) (the control program for kernel-level PPP) is now installed mode 4550 and root:dialer, rather than mode 4555 (in other words, it is no longer world-executable). Users of pppd(8) may need to change their group settings. [MERGED]

The -W option to ps(1) (to extract information from a specified swap device) has been useless for some time; it has been removed. [MERGED]

pwd(1) can now double as realpath(1), a program to resolve pathnames to their underlying physical paths. [MERGED]

The pseudo-random number generator implemented by rand(3) has been improved to provide less biased results.

rc(8) now has an framework for handling dependencies between rc.conf(5) variables. [MERGED]

rc(8) now deletes all non-directory files in /var/run and /var/spool/lock at boot time. [MERGED]

rcmd(3) now supports the use of the RSH environment variable to specify a program to use other than rsh(1) for remote execution. As a result, programs such as dump(8), can use ssh(1) for remote transport.

rdist(1) has been retired from the base system, but is still available from FreeBSD Ports Collection as net/44bsd-rdist.

The resolver(3) in FreeBSD now implements EDNS0 support, which will be necessary when working with IPv6 transport-ready resolvers/DNS servers. [MERGED]

The rfork_thread(3) library call has been added as a helper function to rfork(2). Using this function should avoid the need to implement complex stack swap code. [MERGED]

The -v option to rm(1) now displays the entire pathname of a file being removed.

route(8) is now more verbose when changing indirect routes, in the case of a gateway route that is the same route as the one being modified. [MERGED]

route(8) now uses host/bits syntax instead of net/bits syntax, for compatibility with netstat(1). [MERGED]

route(8) can now create ``proxy only'' published ARP entries. [MERGED]

The route(8) add command now supports the -ifp and -ifa modifiers. [MERGED]

rpcbind(8) has replaced portmap(8).

rpcgen(1) now uses /usr/bin/cpp (as on NetBSD), not /usr/libexec/cpp.

rpc.lockd(8) has been imported from NetBSD. This daemon provides support for servicing client NFS locks.

The performance of the ELF dynamic linker rtld(1) has been improved. [MERGED]

RSA Security has waived all patent rights to the RSA algorithm. As a result, the native OpenSSL implementation of the RSA algorithm is now activated by default, and the security/rsaref port and the librsaUSA and librsaINTL libraries are no longer required for USA and non-USA residents respectively. [MERGED]

rtld(1) will now print the names of all objects that cause each object to be loaded, if the LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS_ALL environment variable is defined.

savecore(8) now supports a -k option to prevent clearing a crash dump after saving it. It also attempts to avoid writing large stretches of zeros to crash dump files to save space and time. [MERGED]

savecore(8) now works correctly on machines with 2 GB or more of RAM. [MERGED]

sed(1) now takes a -E option for extended regular expression support. [MERGED]

send-pr(1) now takes a -a option to include a file into the Fix: section of a problem report. [MERGED]

The setfacl(1) and getfacl(1) commands have been added to manage filesystem Access Control Lists.

setproctitle(3) has been moved from libutil to libc. [MERGED]

sh(1) now implements test as a built-in command for improved efficiency. [MERGED]

sh(1) no longer implements printf as a built-in command because it was considered less valuable compared to the other built-in commands (this functionality is, of course, still available through the printf(1) executable).

sockstat(1) now has -c and -l flags for listing connected and listening sockets, respectively. [MERGED]

split(1) now has the ability to split a file longer than 2GB. [MERGED]

In preparation for meeting SUSv2/POSIX <sys/select.h> requirements, struct selinfo and related functions have been moved to <sys/selinfo.h>.

The strnstr(3) and strcasestr(3) variants of strstr(3) have been implemented. [MERGED]

stty(1) now has support for an erase2 control character, so that, for example, both the Delete and Backspace keys can be used to erase characters. [MERGED]

style.perl(7), a style guide for Perl code in the FreeBSD base system, has been added. [MERGED]

su(1) now uses PAM for authentication.

Boot-time syscons(4) configuration was moved to a machine-independent /etc/rc.syscons. [MERGED]

sysctl(8) now supports a -N option to print out variable names only. [MERGED]

sysctl(8) has replaced the -A and -X options with -ao and -ax respectively; the former options are now deprecated. The -w option is deprecated as well; it is not needed to determine the user's intentions. [MERGED]

sysctl(8) now supports a -e option to separate variable names and values by = rather than :. This feature is useful for producing output that can be fed back to sysctl(8). [MERGED]

sysinstall(8) now properly preserves /etc/mail during a binary upgrade. [MERGED]

sysinstall(8) now uses some more intuitive defaults thanks to some new dialog support functions. [MERGED]

The default root partition in sysinstall(8) is now 100MB on the i386 and 120MB on the Alpha.

sysinstall(8) now lives in /usr/sbin, which simplifies the installation process. The sysinstall(8) manpage is also installed in a more consistent fashion now.

sysinstall(8) now has the ability to load KLDs as a part of the installation. [MERGED]

When run from the installation media, sysinstall(8) will automatically load any device drivers found in the /stand/modules directory of the mfsroot floppy or filesystem image. Note that any drivers so loaded will not appear in the kernel's boot messages; the sysinstall(8) debugging screen will provide additional information. [MERGED]

sysinstall(8) now enables Soft Updates by default on all filesystems it creates, except for the root filesystem. [MERGED]

sysinstall(8) has received updates for its ``auto'' partitioning mode which provide more reasonable defaults for the sizes of partitions that are created; auto-sized partitions can now also recover the space that becomes available when other partitions are deleted. [MERGED]

syslogd(8) can take a -n option to disable DNS queries for every request. [MERGED]

syslogd(8) now supports a LOG_CONSOLE facility (disabled by default), which can be used to log /dev/console output. [MERGED]

syslogd(8) now has the ability to bind to a specific address (as opposed to using every available one) via the -b option. [MERGED]

syslogd(8) now accepts a -c flag to disable repeated line compression. [MERGED]

tail(1) now has the ability to work on files longer than 2GB. [MERGED]

tar(1) now supports the TAR_RSH variable, principally to enable the use of ssh(1) as a transport. [MERGED]

telnet(1) now does autologin and encryption by default; a new -y option turns off encryption.

telnet(1) now supports a -u flag to allow connections to UNIX-domain (AF_UNIX) sockets. [MERGED]

tftpd(8) now takes the -c and -C options, which allow the server to chroot(2) based on the IP address of the connecting client. tftp(1) and tftpd(8) can now transfer files larger than 65535 blocks. [MERGED]

tftpd(8) now supports RFC 2349 (TFTP Timeout Interval and Transfer Size Options); this feature is required by some firmware like EFI boot managers (at least on HP i2000 Itanium servers) in order to boot an image using TFTP.

A version of Transport Independent RPC (TI-RPC) has been imported.

tmpnam(3) will now use the TMPDIR environment variable, if set, to specify the location of temporary files. [MERGED]

tip(1) has been updated from OpenBSD, and has the ability to act as a cu(1) substitute.

top(1) will now use the full width of its tty.

touch(1) now takes a -h option to operate on a symbolic link, rather than what the link points to.

The truncate(1) utility, which truncates or extends the length of files, has been added. [MERGED]

Ukrainian language support has been added to the FreeBSD console. [MERGED]

UUCP has been removed from the base system. It can be found in the Ports Collection, in net/freebsd-uucp.

units(1) has received some updates and bugfixes. [MERGED]

usbdevs(8) now supports a -d flag to show the device driver associated with each device.

uudecode(1) now accepts a -o option to set its output file.

vidcontrol(1) now accepts a -g parameter to select custom text geometry in the VESA_800x600 raster text mode. [MERGED]

vidcontrol(1) now allows the user to omit the font size specification when loading a font, and has some better error-handling. [MERGED]

vidcontrol(1) now supports a -p option to take a snapshot of a syscons(4) video buffer. These snapshots can be manipulated by the graphics/scr2png utility in the Ports Collection. [MERGED]

vidcontrol(1) now supports a -C option to clear the history buffer for a given tty, as well as a -h option to set the size of the history buffer. [MERGED]

The default stripe size in vinum(8) has been changed from 256KB to 279KB, to spread out superblocks more evenly between stripes.

wall(1) now supports a -g flag to write a message to all users of a given group. [MERGED]

watch(8) now takes a -f option to specify a snp(4) device to use. [MERGED]

which(1) is now a C program, rather than a Perl script.

whois(1) now directs queries for IP addresses to ARIN. If a query to ARIN references APNIC or RIPE, the appropriate server will also be queried, provided that the -Q option is not specified. [MERGED]

whois(1) supports a -c option to specify a country code to help direct queries towards a particular whois server. [MERGED]

xargs(1) now supports a -J replstr option that allows the user to tell xargs(1) to insert the data read from standard input at a specific point in the command line arguments rather than at the end. [MERGED]

The compiler chain now uses the FSF-supplied C/C++ runtime initialization code. This change brings about better compatibility with code generated from the various egcs and gcc ports, as well as the stock public FSF source. [MERGED]

The threads library has gained some signal handling changes, bug fixes, and performance enhancements (including zero system call thread switching). gdb(1) thread support has been updated to match these changes. [MERGED]

Significant additions have been made to internationalization support; FreeBSD now has complete locale support for the LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC, and LC_MESSAGES categories. A number of applications have been updated to take advantage of this support.

Locale names have been changed to improve compatibility with the names used by X11R6, as well as a number of other UNIX versions. As an example, the en_US.ISO_8859-1 locale name has been changed to en_US.ISO8859-1. Entries in /etc/locale.alias provide backward compatibility. [MERGED]

/usr/src/share/examples/BSD_daemon/ now contains a scalable Beastie graphic. [MERGED]

As part of an ongoing process, many manual pages were improved, both in terms of their formatting markup and in their content. [MERGED]

    MODIFY_MAILER_FLAGS(`LOCAL',`+S')dnl

    define(`confDEF_USER_ID', `daemon')