# FreeBSD/alpha 6.3-RELEASE Release Notes

### The FreeBSD Project

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 The FreeBSD Documentation Project

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The release notes for FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 6.3-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.

## 1 Introduction

This document contains the release notes for FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE on the Alpha/AXP hardware platform. 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 6.3-RELEASE is a release distribution. It can be found at ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/ 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 6.3-RELEASE can be found on the FreeBSD Web site.

## 2 What's New

This section describes the most user-visible new or changed features in FreeBSD since 6.2-RELEASE.

Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 6.2-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.

### 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A programming error in 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.

### 2.2 Kernel Changes

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

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

#### 2.2.1 Boot Loader Changes

#### 2.2.2 Hardware Support

An acpi_dock(4) driver has been added to provide support for controlling laptop docking station functions via ACPI.

##### 2.2.2.1 Multimedia Support

The snd_envy24(4) driver has been added to support the Envy24 series of audio chips.

The snd_envy24ht(4) driver has been added to support the VIA Envy24HT series of audio chips.

The snd_hda(4) driver has been added. It supports devices that conform to revision 1.0 of the Intel High Definition Audio specification.

The snd_spicds(4) driver has been added to support I2S SPI audio codec chips.

##### 2.2.2.2 Network Interface Support

The ath(4) driver has been updated to HAL version 0.9.20.3.

The axe(4) driver now supports altq(4).

The cxgb(4) driver has been added. It provides support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters based on the Chelsio T3 and T3B chipsets.

The edsc(4) driver, which provides Ethernet discard network interfaces, has been added.

The em(4) driver has been updated to version 6.7.2 from Intel.

The msk(4) driver has been added. It supports network interfaces using the Marvell/SysKonnect Yukon II Gigabit Ethernet controller.

The vge(4) driver now supports altq(4).

The 802.11 protocol stack now has support for 900 MHz cards, as well as quarter- and half-channel support for 802.11a.

#### 2.2.3 Network Protocols

The if_bridge(4) driver now supports RSTP, the Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (802.1w).

The lagg(4) driver, ported from OpenBSD and NetBSD, has been added to support a variety of protocols and algorithms for link aggregation, failover, and fault tolerance.

A new ng_deflate(4) NetGraph node type has been added. It implements Deflate PPP compression.

The ng_ppp(4) Netgraph node is now MPSAFE.

A new ng_pred1(4) NetGraph node type has been added to implement Predictor-1 PPP compression.

A bug which prevented FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE from running IPv6 correctly over gif(4) tunnels has been fixed.

The `net.link.tap.up_on_open` sysctl variable has been added to the tap(4) driver. If enabled, new tap devices will marked `up` upon creation.

#### 2.2.4 Disks and Storage

The mpt(4) driver has been updated to support various new features such as RAID volume and RAID member state/settings reporting, periodic volume re-synchronization status reporting, and sysctl variables for volume re-synchronization rate, volume member write cache status, and volume transaction queue depth.

The mpt(4) driver now supports SAS HBA (partially), 64-bit PCI, and large data transfer.

The scsi_sg driver, which emulates a significant subset of the Linux SCSI SG passthrough device API, has been added. It is intended to allow programs running under Linux emulation (as well as native FreeBSD applications) to access the `/dev/sg`*`` devices supported by Linux.

The twa(4) driver has been updated to the 3.60.03.006 release on the 3ware Web site. It now supports AMCC's 3ware 9650 series of SATA controllers.

#### 2.2.5 File Systems

The unionfs file system has been re-implemented. This version solves many crashing and locking issues compared to the previous implementation. It also adds new “transparent” and “masquerade” modes for automatically creating files in the upper file system layer of unions. More information can be found in the mount_unionfs(8) manual page.

### 2.3 Userland Changes

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

A bug in freebsd-update(8), which caused it not to update SMP kernels correctly, has been fixed.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

#### 2.3.1 `/etc/rc.d` Scripts

The `sendmail` script can be instructed not to rebuild the aliases database if it is missing or older than the aliases file. If desired, set the new rc.conf option `sendmail_rebuild_aliases` to "NO" to turn off that functionality.

The `/etc/rc.d/nfslocking` script has been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. It has been replaced by the `/etc/rc.d/lockd` and `/etc/rc.d/statd` scripts.

### 2.4 Contributed Software

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

BIND has been updated from 9.3.3 to 9.3.4-p1.

BZIP2 has been updated from 1.0.3 to 1.0.4.

GNU Diffutils has been updated from 2.7 to 2.8.7.

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

IPFilter has been updated from 4.1.13 to 4.1.28.

less has been updated from v381 to v416.

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

netcat has been updated from the version in a 4 February 2005 OpenBSD snapshot to the version included in OpenBSD 4.1.

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

sendmail has been updated from 8.13.8 to 8.14.2.

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

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

### 2.5 Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure

### 2.6 Release Engineering and Integration

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

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

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

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

### 2.7 Documentation

## 3 Upgrading from previous releases of FreeBSD

Source upgrades to FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE are only supported from FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE or later. Users of older systems wanting to upgrade 6.3-RELEASE will need to update to FreeBSD 5.3 or newer first, then to FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE.

> Important: Upgrading FreeBSD should, of course, only be attempted after backing up all data and configuration files.

This file, and other release-related documents, can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/.

For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.

For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.