Contents

What's new for FreeBSD 11
Quarterly status reports
Other documentation

These are not Release Notes! This is an informal list of changes which are considered important or interesting to the users of FreeBSD. As such, they may contain incomplete or wrong information. If you are a developer, please keep this page updated!

These notes have not been updated in some time! This page was largely updated during the lead-up to FreeBSD 11, and many of the items have received further updates after those noted below.

The intent is for this page to collect major, user-visible changes to FreeBSD while in the development cycle for FreeBSD 11, no matter if the changes are eventually MFC-ed to earlier versions.

What's new for FreeBSD 11

Overall system / architectural changes

(architecture as in "the overall design of the system", not in the sense of "ARM vs x64")

New sendfile(2) syscall (r293439)
New automounter with Sun-compatible map format, proper kernel support and LDAP integration (r270096)
Improved NUMA support (r282617, r285387)
Improved support for blacklisting bad memory locations (r282228)

Tool chain

Clang has been updated to 3.8.0.
LLDB is enabled by default on amd64 and arm64 (r292350)
Support for C blocks imported from Apple GCC (r260311, tutorial)
ELF tool chain tools addr2line, elfcopy, nm, readelf, size, strings

Kernel, hardware support & other low level improvements

LIBCOMPILER_RT has replaced LIBGCC on all platforms (r260849)
MK_TESTS is enabled by default (r267424)
Support for calling pcibios routines from the bootloader (r271406)
A thin wrapper around the kernel interface to make it easier to write GPIO applications has been added (r274987)
man(1) has been changed to use mandoc to render manpages (r274901)
devctl, a new-bus device control utility which allows the user to request administrative changes to individual devices (r278320)

New Hardware Support

cxgbei: Hardware accelerated iSCSI target and initiator for TOE capable cards supported by cxgbe (r292740)

Networking improvements

Support for linking NIC Receive Side Scaling (RSS) to the network stack's connection-group implementation (r263198)
Support for the UDP-Lite protocol (RFC 3828) has been added to both IPv4 and IPv6 stacks (r264212)
IPX is no longer supported (r263140)
AppleTalk is no longer supported (r263152)
Flowid, bindmulti and RSS awareness have been added to the IPv6 stack (r268562)
RSS awareness has been added to the igb(4) driver (r268028)
RSS awareness has been added to the ixgbe(4) driver (r268029)
netstat can display RSS and flow information with -R (r266448)
PF hash has been changed from Jenkins to Murmur3 which shows a conservative 3% increase in packets per second (r272906)
Netmap support has been added to libpcap allowing tcpdump and other native pcap application to run directly on netmap ports (r272659)
faith(4) and faithd(8) have been removed from base (r274331)
cxgbe(4) will now front loads as much as possible before any driver lock or software queue gets involved (r276485)
DTrace probes for packets flagged as bad by ipfilter. All probes for bad packets are named ipf_fi_bad_* (r297632)

A new version of NetMap

Status:	Committed to CURRENT
Author:	Luigi Rizzo and others
Web:	http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/260368 http://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/261909 http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/

Most relevant features:

netmap pipes, providing bidirectional blocking I/O while moving 100+ Mpps between processes using shared memory channels
kqueue support and segmentation offloading for VALE switch (both used in bhyve)
improved user library
netmap emulation on any NIC, even those without native netmap support (even with emulation the performance is better than BPF)
seamless interconnection of VALE switch, NICs and host stack.
THE USER API HAS SLIGHTLY CHANGED (head/cur/tail pointers instead of pointers/count as before)

ARM improvements

The nand(4) device is enabled for ARM devices by default. (r260921)
Support for the Display Control Unit (DCU4) Freescale Vybrid (r261413)
Support for the Colibri VF50 Evaluation Board (r261411)
Support for the Freescale Synchronous Audio Interface. (r261982)
Support for accessing the imx6 on-chip one-time-programmble data. (r261938)
Support for the Samsung Chromebook (r263427)
Support for the Samsung Chromebook2 (r269369)
Support for the Alpine PoC from Annapurna Labs (r282985)
Support for programming FPGA cores from userspace (r271186)
Support for the Broadcom's VideoCore IV GPU (r278277)
DTrace support has been added to ARM32 (r278529)
Support for Nvidia Jetson TK1 board and Tegra124 SoC (r296936)
Support for USB3.0 on Armada38x (r296826)
SMP support for Allwinner A31 and A31s (r296426)
Support for Allwinner A31/A31s EHCI controller and USB PHY (r296357)
Support for Allwinner A31 RTC controller (r296284)

ARM64

Status:	In Development, partially committed to CURRENT
Author:	AndrewTurner, SemiHalf, and others Sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation
Web:	arm64

Added over many commits listed on the arm64 page.

PowerPC improvements

The default scheduler on MPC85XX architectures has been switched to ULE (r261358)
The Power Management Unit is now supported on the Apple PowerBook G4 (r260872)
Support for the ADT7460/ADT7467 fan controller found in later PowerBooks and iBooks (r261421)
Support for hwpmc(4) on ppc970 (PowerMac G5) (r261342)
Improved support for ATI backlights (r264205 & r264207)
Improved page zeroing performance in the 32-bit AIM MMU (r261258)
X11 via xf86-video-scfb supported on the Playstation 3 (r268895)
/etc/rc.d/power_profile can monitor the battery and AC status on PowerPC laptops (r273009)
Support for cxgbe(4) on powerpc64 has been added (r277230)
Support for RouterBoard RB333/600/800/1100 NAND flash (r282430)
Support for the Vector-Scalar eXtension (VSX) found on the POWER7 and POWER8 (r279189)
Support for QorIQ SoCs (r292903)

Sparc64 improvements

Support for vt(4) on a variety of low-end graphics hardware (SBus adapters, Mach64, QEMU's framebuffer, XVR-100 (r269415)

Virtualization Improvements

bhyve Improvements

bhyve can boot FreeBSD/i386 guests (r261504)
Support for PCI legacy INTx interrupts have been improved in bhyve (r261268)
Virtualized XSAVE support has been added to bhyve, permitting guests to use XSAVE and XSAVE-enabled features like AVX. (r261638)
Support for injecting hardware exceptions for emulated instructions have been added to bhyve. (r262144)
Initial support for booting Windows guests (r282281)
Support for netmap has been added to bhyve (r293459)

Xen Improvements

Xen supports event channel PIRQ allowing for Dom0 to manage physical hardware (r269507)
Support for unmapped IO has been added to blkfront (r269814)

Hyper-V Improvements

HyperV Key-Value Pair driver and daemon has been added (r271493)

AWS EC2 Improvements

EC2 Enhanced Networking (aka. SR-IOV networking) is now enabled when building EC2 images (r293739)

Other Improvements

Tx/Rx multiqueue support has been added to the VMware VMXNET3 Virtual Interface Controller device (r263259)
Support for adding carp interfaces into a jail (r269522)
Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) support has been added to mkimg(1) (r268236)

Wireless Improvements

Support has been added for the Intel Centrino Wireless-N 105 chipset (r266770)
Support for net80211 provided (legacy) sleep management (r264855)
Support for power save management and beacon programming have been added into the ath(4) driver (r265115)

Storage Subsystem Improvements

Unmapped IO support has been added to both the VirtIO Block and SCSI driver (r260582 and r260583)
Support for MegaRAID Fury cards have been added into mfi(4) (r261535)
Support for LSI MPT3 12Gb SAS controllers (r265236)
Sysctls for dirty data tuning have been added for ZFS (r266497)
Support for disklabel64 (r267360)
Support for multi-threading of soft updates. (r269533)

Security

Sandboxing in OpenSSH is enabled by default (r261340)
Capsicum and Casper protects ping(8) against malicious network packets (r261498)
The default crypt(3) hash function has been changed to SHA512 (r261913)
The kernel implementation of sha256 has been replaced with a newer implementation that testing has shown to be about 20% faster (r263218)
The stack protector is now set to strong (r288669)
Integrated support for running CloudABI executables (r285037)
New 'System Hardening' menu in bsdinstall with several security features to be enabled per user's choice (r302897)

Desktop-related changes

The trackpads found in Apple MacBook products are now supported (r261260)
The AMD Radeon DRM/KMS driver supports running 32 bit applications on a 64 bit host (r265262)
Support for more than 8 audio channels per PCM stream for USB audio class compliant devices (r282651)

Other changes

NFS performance has been greatly improved, MFC-ed (r261054, r261055)
Support for displaying Vital Product Data has been added to pciconf(8) (r260926)
Support for GPS ports have been added to the uhso(4) driver. (r260903)
OpenSSL has been upgraded to version 1.0.1i (r269682)
jemalloc has been upgraded to version 3.6.0. (r263974)
Support for Intel's Supervisor Mode Access Prevention (SMAP) instructions has been added to binutils (r261175)
gcc now supports -Wmissing-prototypes in C++ (r261178)
bmake has been upgraded to version 20140620 (r268437)
libc++ has been upgraded to version 3.4 (r261283)
OpenSSH has been upgraded to version 6.6p1 (r263712)
groff incorporates vendor changes up to 2014-01-29 (r261319)
mdocml has been upgraded to version 1.12.3 (r261344)
atf has been upgraded to version 0.20 (r261897)
talk(1) is capable of displaying UTF-8 characters (r263264)
epoll support has been added to the Linux compatibility layer (r255672)
lindev(4) has been removed since /dev/full is now a standard feature of FreeBSD (r265212)
apr has been upgraded to version 1.5.1 (r266735)
Subversion has been upgraded to version 1.8.8 (r262250)
serf has been upgraded to version 1.3.5 (r266728)
libucl has been upgraded to version 20140718 (r268876)
Sendmail has been upgraded to version 8.14.9 (r266528)
ldns has been upgraded to version 1.6.17 (r266114)
unbound has been upgraded to version 1.4.22 (r266114)
tzdata has been upgraded to version 2014e (r267452)
byacc has been upgraded to version 20141006 (r272769)
csup has been removed from base (r267863)
DTrace version bumped to 1.12.1 (r267942)
libc now has re-entrant versions of the hash functions (r268943)
sqlite has been upgraded to version 3.8.5 (r269851)
xz has been upgraded to version 5.2.0 which brings support for multi-threaded compression (r278433)
ncurses has been upgraded to version 5.9 20140222 (r262685)
Baud rate support has been added to telnet (r274364)
libxo version 0.1.6 has been imported into base (r274672)
OpenBSM has been updated to version 1.2 alpha 4 (r292432)
ACPICA has been upgraded to version 20160527 (r300879)
Support for RISC-V (r295041)