FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE Release Notes

2.1 Security Advisories

Two remote denials of service in BIND (one involving DNSSEC and one involving recursive DNS queries) have been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:02.bind. [MERGED]

Processing of IPv6 type 0 Routing Headers is now controlled by the net.inet6.ip6.rthdr0_allowed sysctl variable, which defaults to 0 (off). For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:03.ipv6. [MERGED]

A potential heap overflow in the file(1) utility (and the libmagic(3) library on which it relies) has been fixed. More details can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:04.file. [MERGED]

Problems with libarchive(3) and tar(1) handling corrupted tar(5) archive files have been fixed. More details can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:05.libarchive. [MERGED]

A buffer overflow in tcpdump(1) has been corrected. More information can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:06.tcpdump. [MERGED]

A bug in named(8), which could result in an attacker being able to poison a resolver's DNS cache, has been fixed. More details are included in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:07.bind. [MERGED]

A buffer overflow in OpenSSL (fixed incorrectly in a previously security patch) has been corrected. More details can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:08.openssl. [MERGED]

An flaw that could lead to the disclosure of previously-generated random(4) data has been corrected. Information regarding this issue can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:09.random. [MERGED]

Information disclosure issues found in openpty(3) and ptsname(3) have been corrected. Information regarding this issue can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-08:01.pty. [MERGED]

A programming error in the inet_network(3) Internet address manipulation function that could lead to overwriting a region of memory with user defined data has been corrected. Information regarding this issue can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-08:02.libc. [MERGED]

An error that could allow sendfile(2) to inappropriately access the contents of a file has been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-08:03.sendfile. [MERGED]

2.2 Kernel Changes

acpi(4) now has support for the HPET time counter. [MERGED]

The acpi_ibm(4) driver now supports setting the fan control mode to manual or automatic, and adjusting the fan speed if the fan control mode is manual. To enable manual control of the fan speed, the sysctl variable dev.acpi_ibm.0.fan needs to be set to zero (manual). This should only be used with extreme precaution, as disabling automatic fan control might overheat the hardware and lead to permanent damage.

The apm(4) suspend/resume support has been improved.

The cpufreq(4) CPU frequency control framework is now enabled in the GENERIC kernel.

Support for the Camellia block cipher has been added to the FreeBSD kernel. It can now be specified as a cipher in ipsec(4) and geli(8). More information on Camellia can be found in RFC 4132.

The options COMPAT_43 kernel configuration option has been deemed unnecessary and has been removed from GENERIC and related kernel configurations. This change may result in a small performance increase for some workloads.

The dumb console driver ( dcons(4)) is now enabled in the GENERIC kernel.

The ddb(4) debugger now provides the show sleepq command. This takes a wait channel as an argument and looks for a sleep queue associated with that wait channel.

A bug in file descriptor handling such that a simple close(0); dup(fd) sequence does not return descriptor 0 in some cases, has been fixed.

The gdb(1) remote debugging interface now supports copying console messages to a remote debugger instance. To enable this, set debug.gdbcons="1" in loader.conf, enter boot -d; gdb; step from the loader prompt, then attach gdb(1) from a remote machine. The sysctl variable debug.gdbcons can be used to turn on/off this functionality.

hwpmc(4) and pmcstat(8) now support profiling of dynamically loaded kernel modules and shared objects loaded with dlopen(3).

A new kern.hostuuid sysctl variable has been added to hold a host's Universally Unique Identifier (UUID). This UUID is computed or generated by a new rc.d/hostid startup script and, where possible, is saved to disk to be persistent across reboots.

The INCLUDE_CONFIG_FILE kernel configuration option has been improved. The full configuration of a running kernel can now be obtained via sysctl -b kern.conftxt. It can also be extracted from a kernel file via config -x kernelfile. To preserve the literal kernel configuration with all the comments included, the -C option of config(8) can be used.

Support for Kernel Scheduled Entities (KSE) is now a kernel option (previously it was a mandatory feature in the kernel). It is enabled in the GENERIC kernel (thus there is no change in functionality) for all platforms except sun4v.

The Linux ABI support was enhanced to support emulation of Linux 2.6.16. This is not enabled by default. To turn it on the compat.linux.osrelease sysctl variable has to be set to 2.6.16. Note that this support is still experimental.

Support for Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) and Extended Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI-X) has been added to the kernel's PCI support code. [MERGED]

The priv(9) kernel interface has been added. Its purpose is checking the availability of privilege for threads and credentials. Unlike the existing suser(9) interface, priv(9) exposes a named privilege identifier to the privilege checking code, allowing more complex policies regarding the granting of privilege to be expressed.

FreeBSD now supports concurrent read(2)/ readv(2) access to a file.

The kernel's sx(9) locks have been optimized to use simple atomic operations for the common cases of obtaining and releasing shared and exclusive locks. While this change is not generally user-visible, it is the basis for some substantial performance improvements.

The ULE process scheduler has been revised to improve its behavior, in particular interactivity under load, for both uniprocessor and multiprocessor machines. This implementation has commonly been referred to as “ULE 3.0”. (ULE 3.0 was formerly known as SCHED_SMP, which in turn was based on version 2.0 of the ULE scheduler. ULE 2.0 was never a part of any FreeBSD release, however it was the subject of many development, testing, and benchmarking efforts.)

The SIGCHLD signal queuing has been added. For each child process whose status has been changed, a SIGCHLD instance is queued. If the signal is still pending, and the process changed status several times, the signal information is updated to reflect the latest process status. There is a loader tunable kern.sigqueue.queue_sigchild which can control the behavior, setting it to zero disables the SIGCHLD queuing feature.

A new sysctl variable kern.malloc_stats has been added. This allows exporting of kernel malloc statistics via a binary structure stream.

A new sysctl variable kern.forcesigexit has been added. This forces a process to sigexit if a trap signal is being held by the current thread or ignored by the current process. It is enabled by default.

The pcvt(4) driver, an alternative to syscons(4), has been removed, as it had fallen out of sync with the rest of the kernel.

RedZone, a buffer corruption protection for the kernel malloc(9) facility has been implemented. This detects both buffer underflows and overflows at runtime on free(9) and realloc(9), and prints backtraces from where memory was allocated and from where it was freed. For more details, see the redzone(9) manual page.

A new loader tunable vm.kmem_size_min has been added. This allows to specify a minimal size for vm.kmem_size.

A new sysctl variable vm.zone_stats has been added. This allows to export uma(9) allocator statistics via a binary structure stream.

The sysctl variable hw.pci.do_powerstate has been split into two sysctl variables hw.pci.do_powerstate_nodriver and hw.pci.do_powerstate_resume. Also, these variables have been changed from a boolean to a range. 0 means no power management, 1 means conservative power management which any device class that has caused problems is added to the watch list, 2 means aggressive power management where any device class that is not fundamental to the system is added to the list, and 3 means power them all down unconditionally. The default values are 0 for hw.pci.do_powerstate_nodriver and 1 for hw.pci.do_powerstate_resume.

[ia64] The GENERIC kernel now enables SMP support by default.

Sample kernel configuration files src/sys/arch/conf/MAC for the Mandatory Access Control framework have been added.

POSIX_TIMERS support has been updated to 200112L.

An experimental support for POSIX message queue has been implemented.

The locking strategy for UNIX domain sockets has been revised to improve concurrency; this change has yielded substantial performance improvements on various SMP workloads (in particular, MySQL on 8-way amd64 systems) with little or no measured overhead on UP systems.

Several minor but widespread changes to the Newbus API have been made In order to support some on-going work with interrupt filtering. Because this change also breaks the kernel ABI, all third-party device drivers will need to be modified and recompiled.

2.3 Userland Changes

The addr2ascii() and ascii2addr() library calls, originally introduced by the INRIA IPv6 implementation, have been removed from libc. They have no consumers in the FreeBSD base system. In a related change, support for AF_LINK addresses has been added to getnameinfo(3).

Padding of ai_addrlen in struct addrinfo has been removed, which was originally for the ABI compatibility. For example, this change breaks the ABI compatibility of the getaddrinfo(3) function on 64-bit architectures, including FreeBSD/amd64, FreeBSD/ia64, and FreeBSD/sparc64.

The atrun(8) utility has gained PAM support. Before running a job for a user account, it will check the account status with PAM and refuse to run the job if the account is unavailable. The default definition of an unavailable account includes those expired and administratively locked out with pw(8).

The camcontrol(8) utility now supports a readcap command to display the size of devices. [MERGED]

The cron(8) daemon has gained PAM support. Before running a command from account's private crontab(5) file, it will check the account status with PAM and skip the command if the account is unavailable. The default definition of an unavailable account includes those expired and administratively locked out with pw(8). In addition, cron(8) will skip commands from private crontab(5) files if a nologin(5) file exists, unless the crontab(5) owner's login class is exempt from nologin(5) restriction. Commands from the system file /etc/crontab are not subject to the PAM check.

The dhclient(8) program now supports the Classless Static Route option as described in RFC 3442.

The dump(8) and restore(8) programs now attempt to save and restore extended attribute information on files.

A libelf library implementing the SVR4 elf(3) / gelf(3) API for manipulating ELF files has been added.

The fdisk(8) program now supports a -p flag to print the slice table in fdisk configuration format. [MERGED]

T/TCP support in finger(1) (and the -T flag used to enable it) has been removed.

A bug in the find(1) program which prevents numeric arguments for -user and -group from working as expected has been fixed.

The freebsd-update(8) command now supports an upgrade command to perform binary upgrades between different versions of FreeBSD. [MERGED]

The ftpd(8) utility now has support for RFC2389 (FEAT) and rudimentary support for RFC2640 (UTF8). The RFC2640 support is optional and can be enabled using the new -8 flag. More information can be found in the ftpd(8) manual page. [MERGED]

The gcc(1) SSP (Stack-Smashing Protector) support is now enabled by default.

The gbde(8) utility now supports -k and -K options to specify a key file in addition to a passphrase.

The gpt(8) utility now supports setting GPT partition labels.

The gvinum(8) utility now supports the resetconfig sub-command.

An implementation of Generic Security Service API (GSS-API) version 2 and its C binding described in RFC2743 and RFC2744 has been added. This is a new extensible GSS-API layer which can support GSS-API plugins, similar to the Solaris implementation, and the Kerberos 5 GSS mechanism has been rewritten as a plugin library for the new implementation.

The hccontrol(8) utility now supports HCI node autodetection.

The id(1) utility now prints the effective user ID after the group ID.

The ipfwpcap(8) utility has been added; it captures packets on a divert(4) socket and writes them as pcap(3) (also known as tcpdump(1)) format data to a file or pipe. [MERGED]

The kdump(1) program now supports printing flags in a system call argument by using symbol names.

The kenv(1) utility now supports a -q flag to suppress warnings.

kgdb(1) now supports a -w option to open kmem-based targets in read-write mode. This allows one to use kgdb on /dev/mem and be able to patch memory on a live system.

The libarchive(3) library now supports POSIX.1e-style Extended Attributes.

The libarchive(3) library now contains support for ar(1)-style archives.

The libc library now includes initial implementation of symbol maps and symbol version definitions.

The libedit library has been updated from the NetBSD source tree as of August 2005.

The libm library now includes initial implementation of symbol maps and symbol version definitions.

A new malloc(3) implementation has been introduced. This implementation, sometimes referred to as “jemalloc”, was designed to improve the performance of multi-threaded programs, particularly on SMP systems, while preserving the performance of single-threaded programs. Due to the use of different algorithms and data structures, jemalloc may expose some previously-unknown bugs in userland code, although most of the FreeBSD base system and common ports have been tested and/or fixed. Note that jemalloc uses mmap(2) to obtain memory and only uses sbrk(2) under limited circumstances (and then only for 32-bit architectures). As a result, the datasize resource limit has little practical effect for typical applications. The vmemoryuse resource limit, however, can be used to bound the total virtual memory used by a process, as described in limits(1).

The mdconfig(8) utility now supports producing device listings formatted as XML. Currently, the list and query sub-commands support this feature.

The mdconfig(8) utility's -u option now supports specifying multiple devices separated by comma character.

The mdmfs(8) utility now supports a -P flag to allow skipping the newfs(8) process when using a vnode-backed disk.

The mdmfs(8) utility now supports a -E flag to allow to specify location of the mdconfig(8) utility instead of using the default one (/sbin/mdconfig).

A new function memmem(3) has been implemented in libc. This is the binary equivalent to strstr(3) and found in glibc.

The mount(8) dev and nodev options have been removed.

The mount(8) utility now supports mqueuefs(5).

A bug which prevents the mount(8) utility from converting a read-only mount to read-write via mount -u -o rw, has been fixed.

A number of the file system-specific mount_* utilities have been removed, in favor of the more general mount(8) command with a -t option. Specifically, these commands are: mount_devfs, mount_ext2fs, mount_fdescfs, mount_linprocfs, mount_procfs, mount_std, mount_linsysfs, mount_reiserfs, and mount_umapfs.

The mrouted(8) multicast routing daemon has been removed from the FreeBSD base system. It implements the DVMRP multicast routing protocol, which has largely been replaced by PIM in many multicast installations. The related map-mbone(8) and mrinfo(8) utilities have also been removed. These programs are now available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection as net/mrouted.

The netstat(1) utility now supports printing sctp(4) protocol statistics.

The /etc/nsswitch.conf file is now installed statically instead of being generated on every reboot.

The objformat(1) utility and getobjformat(3) library (the last remnants of a.out object file support) have been removed.

The pam_nologin(8) module no longer provides an authentication function; instead it now provides an account management function. Third-party files in /usr/local/etc/pam.d may need manual editing; specifically, lines in these files of the form:

auth    required        pam_nologin.so  no_warn

These lines need to have the word auth replaced with the word account.

nscd(8) has been added. It is a daemon that caches the results of nsswitch lookups (such as those to the password, group, and services databases) for improved performance.

The pkill(1) utility now supports a -F option which allows to restrict matches to a process whose PID is stored in the pidfile file. When another new option -L is also specified, the pidfile file must be locked with the flock(2) syscall or created with pidfile(3).

The pkill(1) utility now supports a -I flag which works like -i of rm(1). When this flag is specified, pkill(1) will ask for confirmation before sending a signal to each matching process.

The pmcstat(8) program has seen several enhancements: It can now log over a network socket to a remote host. The -c now takes a comma-seperated list of CPUs to configure for PMC allocation. The -t option has been enhanced to take a regular expression for selecting processes based on their command names. pmcstat(8) now allocates system PMCs on all CPUs by default, not just CPU 0.

The powerd(8) program now supports a -P option, which specifies a pidfile to use.

The pw(8) program now supports a -M option to set the permissions of a user's newly created home directory. [MERGED]

The DNS resolver library in FreeBSD's libc has been updated to that from BIND 9.4.1.

The rpcbind(8) program can now bind its TCP listening socket to an IP address other than INADDR_ANY using the -h flag. The new -6 flag allows it to bind to IPv6 addresses only.

The rpcgen(1) utility now generates headers and stub files that can be used with ANSI C compilers by default.

The rpc.lockd(8) and rpc.statd(8) programs now accept -p options to indicate which port they should bind to. [MERGED]

The rtld(1) runtime linker now supports ELF symbol versioning using GNU semantics. This implementation aims to be compatible with symbol versioning support as implemented by GNU libc and documented in http://people.redhat.com/~drepper/symbol-versioning and LSB 3.0. Also, dlvsym() function has been added to allow lookups for a specific version of a given symbol.

The sa(8) utility now supports -U and -P flags. They can be used to specify the per-user and per-process summary file location, respectively.

The sade(8) disk partitioning and labeling utility has been added. This utility is based on the partition editing bits of sysinstall(8).

A bug in the sed(1) utility which can cause incorrect calculation of pattern space length in some cases has been fixed.

The sed(1) utility now supports case-insensitive pattern matching; this feature can be enabled by using the I flag after the closing delimiter for a regular expression.

The behavior of the setenv(3) family of library calls has been changed from the historic BSD API to the behavior mandated by POSIX. As a result, several base system utility that relied on the old API have been updated to track this change.

The -h flag to setfacl(1) now properly sets the ACL on a symbolic link, not the link target.

The sockstat(1) utility, which shows connected and listening network sockets, now supports a new -P command-line option, which can be used to filter displayed sockets by protocol name (as listed in protocols(5)).

The sysctl(8) utility now supports a -q flag to suppress a limited set of warnings and errors.

The version of tcpslice in the FreeBSD base system has been removed due to obsolescence. A more up-to-date version can be found in the Ports Collection as net/tcpslice.

The time(1) utility now prints the time that a given command has been running if sent a SIGINFO signal.

The top(1) program now supports a -a flag to display process titles from their argument vectors; this feature is useful for watching processes that change their titles via setproctitle(3).

The top(1) program now supports a -j flag to display the jail(8) ID for each process. [MERGED]

The touch(1) utility now supports a -A flag that allows the access and modification times of a file to be adjusted by a specified value. [MERGED]

The truss(1) utility now supports an -s flag for the same functionality as the strace utility (devel/strace).

The truss(1) utility no longer depends on the availability of the procfs(5) file system; it uses the ptrace(2) interface instead for controlling a traced process.

[powerpc] The truss(1) utility now supports FreeBSD/powerpc.

The usbd(8) utility has been removed. The devd(8) utility and its configuration file now support functionality which is equivalent to it.

The uuidgen(1) utility has been moved from /usr/bin to /bin.

The vnconfig(8) utility, which was long ago replaced by mdconfig(8), has been removed.

The wicontrol(8) utility has been removed. Configuration functions for wi(4) interfaces should be performed using ifconfig(8).

The shared library version number of all libraries has been updated due to some possible ABI changes. The libraries include: snmp_*, libdialog, libg2c, libobjc, libreadline, libregex, libstdc++, libkrb5, libalias, libarchive, libbegemot, libbluetooth, libbsnmp, libbz2, libc_r, libcrypt, libdevstat, libedit, libexpat, libfetch, libftpio, libgpib, libipsec, libkiconv, libmagic, libmp, libncp, libncurses, libnetgraph, libngatm, libopie, libpam, libpthread, libradius, libsdp, libsmb, libtacplus, libthr, libthread_db, libugidfw, libusbhid, libutil, libvgl, libwrap, libypclnt, libm, libcrypto, libssh, and libssl.

The wcsdup() function has been implemented. This function is popular in Microsoft and GNU systems.

The wlandebug(8) utility has been added to the main FreeBSD source tree (it previously lived in a tools area). It provides control over a number of types of debugging output in the wlan(4) module and related drivers, and can be useful for debugging wireless issues.

The wpa_passphrase(8) utility has been added. It generates a 256-bit pre-shared WPA key from an ASCII passphrase. [MERGED]

mdconfig_md0="-t malloc -s 10m"
mdconfig_md1="-t vnode -f /var/foo.img"

2.4 Contributed Software

Intel ACPI-CA has been updated to 20070320.

awk has been updated from the 24 April 2005 release to the 1 May 2007 release. [MERGED]

BIND has been updated from 9.3.3 to 9.4.2.

BSNMPD has been updated from 1.11 to 1.12.

BZIP2 has been updated from 1.0.3 to 1.0.4. [MERGED]

GNU Diffutils has been updated from 2.7 to 2.8.7. [MERGED]

DRM has been updated to a snapshot from DRI CVS as of 20060517. [MERGED]

The Forth Inspired Command Language (FICL) used in the boot loader has been updated to 3.03.

FILE has been updated from 4.12 to 4.23.

GCC has been updated from 3.4.6 to 4.2.1.

GNU Readline library has been updated from 5.0 to 5.2 patch 2. [MERGED]

The GNU version of gzip has been replaced with a modified version of gzip ported from NetBSD. [MERGED]

IPFilter has been updated from 4.1.13 to 4.1.28. [MERGED]

less has been updated from v394 to v416. [MERGED]

libpcap has been updated from 0.9.4 to 0.9.8.

netcat has been updated from the version included in OpenBSD 3.9 to the version included in OpenBSD 4.1. [MERGED]

OpenSSL has been updated from 0.9.7e to 0.9.8e.

ncurses has been updated from 5.2-20020615 to 5.6-20061217. ncurses now also has wide character support. [MERGED]

hostapd has been updated from version 0.3.9 to version 0.5.8.

PF has been updated from OpenBSD version 3.7 to OpenBSD version 4.1. This update includes a number of functional enhancements. Two notable changes are that keep state is now the default behavior for rules in pf.conf(5) and that flags S/SA is now the default flags setting for TCP rules. The options no state and flags any can be used to disable stateful filtering or TCP flags checking, respectively.

sendmail has been updated from 8.13.8 to 8.14.2. [MERGED]

tcpdump has been updated from 3.9.4 to 3.9.8.

The timezone database has been updated from the tzdata2006g release to the tzdata2007k release. [MERGED]

tip has been updated to a snapshot from OpenBSD as of 20060831.

TrustedBSD OpenBSM, has been updated from version 1.0 alpha 12 to version 1.0.

WPA Supplicant has been updated from version 0.3.9 to version 0.5.8.

2.5 Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure

2.6 Release Engineering and Integration

The default partition sizing algorithm of the sysinstall(8) utility has been changed.

• On systems where the disk capacity is larger than (3 * RAMsize + 10GB), the default sizes will now be as follows:

  Partition	Size
  swap	RAMsize * 2
  /	512 MB
  /tmp	512 MB
  /var	1024 MB + RAMsize
  /usr	the rest (8GB or more)

• On systems where the disk capacity is larger than (RAMsize / 8 + 2 GB), the default sizes will be in the following ranges, with space allocated proportionally:

  Partition	Size
  swap	from RAMsize / 8 to RAMsize * 2
  /	from 256MB to 512MB
  /tmp	from 128MB to 512MB
  /var	from 128MB to 1024MB
  /usr	from 1536MB to 8192MB

• On systems with even less disk space, the existing behavior is not changed.

A new showconfig target has been added in src/Makefile to show the build configuration of the FreeBSD source tree.

The src.conf file, which contains settings that will apply to every build involving the FreeBSD source tree, has been added. For details, see build(7) and src.conf(5).

The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment (x11/gnome2) has been updated from 2.16.1 to 2.20.1. [MERGED]

The supported version of the KDE desktop environment (x11/kde3) has been updated from 3.5.4 to 3.5.7. [MERGED]

The supported version of the Xorg windowing system (x11/xorg) has been updated from 6.9.0 to 7.3.0. [MERGED]

The default value of X11BASE has been changed from /usr/X11R6 to /usr/local, the default value of LOCALBASE. [MERGED]

The ISO images for FreeBSD are now sized for 700MB CDROM media. For most prior versions of FreeBSD, they assumed 650MB CDROM media. [MERGED]

2.7 Documentation

Documentation of existing functionality has been improved by the addition of the following manual pages: acpi_sony(4), device_get_sysctl(9), ext2fs(5), mca(8), nanobsd(8), snd_mss(4), snd_t4dwave(4), sysctl(9).

Initial support for kernel subsystem API documentation generating framework using devel/doxygen has been added into src/sys/doc/subsys. To generate the API document, type make doxygen in src/ directory.