FreeBSD/alpha 5.4-RELEASE Release Notes

2.1 Security Advisories

A bug in the fetch(1) utility, which allows a malicious HTTP server to cause arbitrary portions of the client's memory to be overwritten, has been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-04:16.fetch.

A bug in procfs(5) and linprocfs(5) which could allow a malicious local user to read parts of kernel memory or perform a local denial of service attack by causing a system panic, has been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-04:17.procfs.

Two buffer overflows in the TELNET client program have been corrected. They could have allowed a malicious TELNET server or an active network attacker to cause telnet(1) to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running it. More information can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:01.telnet.

A information disclosure vulnerability in the sendfile(2) system call, which could permit it to transmit random parts of kernel memory, has been fixed. More details are in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:02.sendfile.

An information leak vulnerability in the SIOCGIFCONF ioctl(2), which leaked 12 bytes of kernel memory, has been fixed. More details are in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:04.ifconf.

Several programming errors in cvs(1), which could potentially cause arbitrary code to be executed on CVS servers, have been corrected. Further information can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:05.cvs.

2.2 Kernel Changes

The jail(8) feature now supports a new sysctl security.jail.chflags_allowed, which controls the behavior of chflags(1) within a jail. If set to 0 (the default), then a jailed root user is treated as an unprivileged user; if set to 1, then a jailed root user is treated the same as an unjailed root user.

The loader tunable debug.mpsafevm has been enabled by default.

A number of bugs have been fixed in the ULE scheduler.

2.3 Userland Changes

The ftpd(8) program now uses the 212 and 213 status codes for directory and file status correctly (211 was used in the previous versions). This behavior is described in RFC 959.

The getaddrinfo(3) function now queries A DNS resource records before AAAA records when AF_UNSPEC is specified. Some broken DNS servers return NXDOMAIN against non-existent AAAA queries, even when it should return NOERROR with empty return records. This is a problem for an IPv4/IPv6 dual stack node because the NXDOMAIN returned by the first query of an AAAA record makes the querying server stop attempting to resolve the A record if any. Also, this behavior has been recognized as a potential denial-of-service attack (see http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/714121 for more details). Note that although the query order has been changed, the returned result still includes AF_INET6 records before AF_INET records.

The create command of the gpt(8) utility now supports a -f command-line flag to force creation of a GPT even when there is an MBR record on a disk.

The gvinum(8) utility now supports checkparity, rebuildparity, and setstate subcommands.

The libarchive library (as well as the tar(1) command that uses it) now has support for reading ISO images (with optional RockRidge extensions) and ZIP archives (with deflate and none compression).

The libgpib library has been added to give userland access to GPIB devices (using the the pcii driver) via the ibfoo API.

A number of bugfixes for libpthread have been merged from HEAD.

A number of new functions have been implemented in the math(3) library. These include ceill(3), floorl(3), ilogbl(3), fma(3) and variants, lrint(3) and variants, and lround(3) and variants.

The moused(8) daemon now supports ``virtual scrolling'', in which mouse motions made while holding down the middle mouse button are interpreted as scrolling. This feature is enabled with the -V flag.

A separate directory has been added for named(8) dynamic zones which is owned by the bind user (for creation of the zone journal file). For more detail, see an example dynamic zone in the sample named.conf(5).

The newfs(8) utility now supports a -n flag to suppress the creation of a .snap directory on new file systems. This feature is intended for use on memory or vnode file systems that will not require snapshot support.

The newfs(8) utility now emits a warning when creating a UFS or UFS2 file system that cannot support snapshots. This situation can occur in the case of very large file systems with small block sizes.

The NO_NIS compile-time knob for userland has been added. As its name implies, enabling this Makefile variable will cause NIS support to be excluded from various programs and will cause the NIS utilities to not be built.

The ncal(1) utility now supports a -m flag to generate a calendar for a specified month in the current year.

The periodic(8) security output now supports the display of information about blocked packet counts from pf(4).

The ppp(8) program now implements an echo parameter, which allows LCP ECHOs to be enabled independently of LQR reports. Older versions of ppp(8) would revert to LCP ECHO mode on negotiation failure. It is now necessary to specify enable echo to get this behavior.

Two bugs in the pppd(8) program have been fixed. They may result in an incorrect CBCP response, which violates the Microsoft PPP Callback Control Protocol section 3.2.

The restore(8) utility has regained the ability to read FreeBSD version 1 dump tapes.

The rm(1) utility now supports an -I option that asks for confirmation (once) if recursively removing directories or if more than 3 files are listed in the command line.

The rtld(1) dynamic linker now supports specifying library replacements via the LD_LIBMAP environment variable. This variable will override the entries in libmap.conf(5).

The strftime(3) function now supports some GNU extensions such as - (no padding), _ (use space as padding), and 0 (zero padding).

The syslog(3) function is now thread-safe.

The syslogd(8) utility now opens an additional domain socket (/var/run/logpriv by default), with 0600 permissions to be used by privileged programs. This prevents privileged programs from locking when the domain sockets run out of buffer space due to a local denial-of-service attack.

The syslogd(8) now supports -S option which allows to change the pathname of the privileged socket. This is useful when you do not want the daemon to receive any messages from the local sockets (/var/run/log and /var/run/logpriv are used by default).

The syslogd(8) utility now allows : and % characters in the hostname specifications. These characters are used in IPv6 addresses and scope IDs.

The systat(1) -netstat display is now IPv6-aware.

The -f option of tail(1) utility now supports more than one file at a time.

The tcpdrop(8) command, which closes a selected TCP connection, has been added. It was obtained from OpenBSD.

whois(1) now supports a -k flag for querying whois.krnic.net (the National Internet Development Agency of Korea), which holds details of IP address allocations within Korea.

A bug, which caused the last line of configuration files such as hosts(5), services(5), and so on to be ignored if it did not end in a newline character, has been fixed.

ifconfig_fxp0_name="net0"
ifconfig_net0="inet 10.0.0.1/16"

2.4 Contributed Software

BIND has been updated from version 9.3.0 to version 9.3.1.

Heimdal has been updated from 0.6.1 to 0.6.3.

A snapshot of netcat from OpenBSD as of 4 February 2005 has been added. More information can be found in the nc(1) manual page.

OpenSSL has been updated from 0.9.7d to 0.9.7e.

sendmail has been updated from version 8.13.1 to version 8.13.3.

The timezone database has been updated from tzdata2004e to tzdata2004g.

2.5 Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure

The ports/INDEX* files, which kept an index of all of the entries in the ports collection, have been removed from the CVS repository. These files were generated only infrequently, and therefore were usually out-of-date and inaccurate. Users requiring an index file (such as for use by programs such as portupgrade(1)) have two alternatives for obtaining a copy:

• Build an index file based on the current ports tree by running make index from the top of the ports/ tree.

• Fetch an index file over the network by running make fetchindex from the top of the ports/ tree. This index file will (typically) be accurate to within a day.

2.6 Release Engineering and Integration

In prior FreeBSD releases, the disc1 CD-ROM (or ISO image) was a bootable installation disk containing the base system, ports tree, and common packages. The disc2 CD-ROM (or ISO image) was a bootable ``fix it'' disk with a live filesystem, to be used for making emergency repairs. This layout has now changed. For all architectures except ia64, the disc1 image now contains the base system distribution files, ports tree, and the live filesystem, making it suitable for both an initial installation and repair purposes. (On the ia64, the live filesystem is on a separate disk due to its size.) Packages appear on separate disks; in particular, the disc2 image contains commonly packages such as desktop environments. Documents from the FreeBSD Documentation Project also appear on disc2.

The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment has been updated from 2.6.2 to 2.10. More information about running GNOME on FreeBSD can be found on the FreeBSD GNOME Project Web page.

The supported version of the KDE desktop environment has been updated from 3.3.0 to 3.4.0. More information regarding running KDE on FreeBSD can be found on the KDE on FreeBSD Web page.

The supported version of Xorg has been updated from 6.7.0 to 6.8.2.

2.7 Documentation

The following manual pages, which were derived from RFCs and possibly violate the IETF's copyrights, have been replaced: gai_strerror(3), getaddrinfo(3), getnameinfo(3), inet6_opt_init(3), inet6_option_space(3), inet6_rth_space(3), inet6_rthdr_space(3), icmp6(4), and ip6(4).