/* **************** ATTENTION **************** */ /* Please keep the entries in this page sorted first according to the section, then by reverse date, */ /* so that the latest / newest additions are at the top of their respective sections. */ /* **************** ATTENTION **************** */
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”)
Tool chain
- Clang has been updated to 3.8.0.
- LLDB is enabled by default on amd64 and arm64 (r292350)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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
Virtualization Improvements
bhyve Improvements
- bhyve can boot FreeBSD/i386 guests (r261504)
- 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
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
Wireless Improvements
Storage Subsystem Improvements
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
Other changes
- Support for displaying Vital Product Data has been added to pciconf(8) (r260926)
- 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)
- 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)
Quarterly status reports
Other documentation
It is useful to keep an eye on Recent Wiki Changes and the commits mailing list (http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/svn-src-head).