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  - Production Release:
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# FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE Release Notes

## Release Highlights

The highlights in the 7.3-RELEASE are the following:

- The ZFS file system has been updated to version 13. The changes include ZFS operations by a regular user, L2ARC, ZFS Intent Log on separated disks (slog), sparse volumes, and so on.

- A lock handling error has been fixed in interaction between malloc(3) implementation and threading library.

- A deadlock in the sched_ule(4) scheduler has been fixed.

- A new sysctl variable `security.bsd.map_at_zero` has been added and set to `1` (allow) by default. This controls whether FreeBSD allows to map an object at the address `0`, which is part of the user-controlled portion of the virtual address space. Disabling this has some effect on preventing an attack which injects malicious code into that location and triggers a NULL pointer dereference in the kernel.

- A new boot loader `gptzfsboot`, which supports GPT and ZFS has been added. `zfsloader`, the final boot loader similar to loader(8) which supports ZFS has been added.

- [amd64, i386] CPU cache flushing has been optimized when changing caching attributes of pages by doing nothing for CPUs that support self-snooping and using `CLFLUSH` instead of a full cache invalidate when possible.

- The amdsbwd(4) driver for AMD SB600/SB7xx watchdog timer has been added.

- [amd64, i386] The hwpmc(4) driver for Hardware Performance Monitoring Counter support has been added.

- DRM now supports Radeon HD 4200 (RS880), 4770 (RV740), and R6/7xx 3D, and Intel G41 chips.

- The alc(4) driver for Atheros AR8131/AR8132 PCIe Ethernet controller has been added.

- [sparc64] The cas(4) driver has been added to provide support for Sun Cassini/Cassini+ and National Semiconductor DP83065 Saturn Gigabit Ethernet devices.

- A userland utility mfiutil(8) for the mfi(4) devices has been added.

- A userland utility mptutil(8) for the mpt(4) devices has been added.

- The yp(8) utilities now support `shadow.byname` and `shadow.byuid` maps. These requires privileged port access.

- The service(8) command as an easy interface for the rc.d scripts has been added.

- ISC BIND has been updated to version 9.4-ESV.

- sendmail has been updated from version 8.14.3 to version 8.14.4.

- The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment (`x11/gnome2`) has been updated to 2.28.2.

- The supported version of the KDE desktop environment (`x11/kde4`) has been updated to 4.3.5.

- FreeBSD release ISO images now have “FreeBSD-” at the beginning of the filenames.

For more details, please see the Detailed Release Notes.

A list of all platforms currently under development can be found on the Supported Platforms page.