FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE Release Notes
Abstract
The release notes for FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 12-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.
Table of Contents
Introduction
This document contains the release notes for FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE. It describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of FreeBSD. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of FreeBSD.
The release distribution to which these release notes apply represents the latest point along the 12-STABLE development branch since 12-STABLE was created. Information regarding pre-built, binary release distributions along this branch can be found at https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/.
The release distribution to which these release notes apply represents a point along the 12-STABLE development branch between 11.2-RELEASE and the future 13.0-RELEASE. Information regarding pre-built, binary release distributions along this branch can be found at https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/.
This distribution of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE is a release distribution. It can be found at https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/ 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 12.0-RELEASE can be found on the FreeBSD Web site.
This document describes the most user-visible new or changed features in FreeBSD since 11.2-RELEASE. In general, changes described here are unique to the 12-STABLE branch unless specifically marked as MERGED features.
Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 11.2-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.
Upgrading from Previous Releases of FreeBSD
[amd64,i386] Binary upgrades between RELEASE versions (and snapshots of the various security branches) are supported using the freebsd-update(8) utility. The binary upgrade procedure will update unmodified userland utilities, as well as unmodified GENERIC kernels distributed as a part of an official FreeBSD release. The freebsd-update(8) utility requires that the host being upgraded have Internet connectivity.
Source-based upgrades (those based on recompiling the FreeBSD base system from source code) from previous versions are supported, according to the instructions in /usr/src/UPDATING.
|
Important
|
Upgrading FreeBSD should only be attempted after backing up all data and configuration files. |
Security and Errata
This section lists the various Security Advisories and Errata Notices since 11.2-RELEASE.
Security Advisories
| Advisory | Date | Topic |
|---|---|---|
No advisories. |
Errata Notices
| Errata | Date | Topic |
|---|---|---|
No errata notices. |
Userland
This section covers changes and additions to userland applications, contributed software, and system utilities.
Userland Configuration Changes
Group permissions on /dev/acpi have been changed to allow users in the operator GID to invoke acpiconf(8)
to suspend the system. [r335864]
(Sponsored by DARPA, AFRL)
The default devfs.rules(5) configuration has been updated to allow mount_fusefs(8) with jail(8) . [r336565]
The newsyslog(8) utility has been updated to reject configuration entries that specify setuid(2) or executable log files. [r338165] (Sponsored by Dell EMC Isilon)
The WITH_REPRODUCIBLE_BUILD src.conf(5)
knob has been enabled by default. [r338642]
(Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
LDNS now enables DANE-TA, and GOST has been removed. [r339303]
A new src.conf(5)
knob, WITH_RETPOLINE, has been added to enable the retpoline mitigation for userland builds. [r340773]
(Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
Userland Application Changes
xlint and the ability to build lint libraries or lint source code has been removed.
The legacy gdb(1)
utility included in the base system is now installed to /usr/libexec for use with crashinfo(8)
. The gdbserver and gdbtui utilities are no longer installed. For interactive debugging, lldb(1)
or a modern version of gdb(1)
from devel/gdb should be used. A new src.conf(5)
knob, WITHOUT_GDB_LIBEXEC has been added to disable building gdb(1)
. The gdb(1)
utility is still installed in /usr/bin on sparc64. [r317416]
The setfacl(1)
utility has been updated to include a new flag, -R, used to operate recursively on directories. [r332396]
(Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The cat(1)
utility has been updated to print output aligned the same regardless of if invoked with -ne or -be. [r323865]
The default bootstrap linker has been changed to ld_lld(1) for amd64. [r334391] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The dhclient(8)
utility has been updated to add a configuration knob to allow superseding the interface-mtu option provided by an incorrectly-configured DHCP server. [r334443]
The asf(8) utility has been removed, as kgdb(1) now handles kernel module state internally. [r335222] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The sha224(1) utility has been added. [r336126]
The geli(8) utility has been updated to provide support for initializing multiple providers at once when they use the same passphrase and/or key. [r336659]
The default bootstrap linker has been changed to ld_lld(1) for i386. [r336901] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The default bootstrap linker has been changed to ld_lld(1) for armv7. [r337057] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The dd(1)
utility has been updated to add the status=progress option, which prints the status of its operation on a single line once per second, similar to GNU dd(1)
. [r337505]
The date(1)
utility has been updated to include a new flag, -I, which prints its output in ISO 8601 formatting. [r337332]
The bectl(8)
utility has been added, providing an administrative interface for managing ZFS boot environments, similar to sysutils/beadm. [r337663]
The ls(1)
utility has been updated to include a new --color=when flag, where when can be one of always, auto (default), or never. [r337956]
The bhyve(8)
utility has been updated to add a new subcommand to the -l and -s flags, help, which when used, prints a list of supported LPC and PCI devices, respectively. [r338210]
(Sponsored by iXsystems)
The tftp(1) utility has been updated to change the default transfer mode from ASCII to binary. [r338258]
The lastlogin(8) utility has been updated to include libxo(3) support. [r338353]
Contributed Software
The ELF Tool Chain has been updated to version r3614. [r333063] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The vt(4) Terminus BSD Console font has been updated to version 4.46. [r332452] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The clang, llvm, lld, lldb, compiler-rt utilities and libc++ have been updated to version 6.0.1. [r335799]
The bsnmp utility has been updated to version 1.13. [r335885]
The WPA utilities have been updated to version 2.6. [r336203]
Note:
Source-based upgrades from FreeBSD 11.x and earlier require the ntpd UID (123) and GID (123) to exist before the installworld target is run. See the "rebuild everything and install" section of UPDATING for the documented procedure for source-based upgrades for more details.
Support for UDP-lite has been added to dtrace_udplite(4) . [r337018]
The lua utility has been updated to version 5.3.5. [r337810]
Support for send, receive, and state-change providers have been added to dtrace_sctp(4) . [r338213]
OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.8p1. [r338561]
Additional capsicum(4) support has been added to sshd(8) . [r339216]
Serf has been updated to version 1.3.9. [r339256]
ACPICA has been updated to version 20181003. [r339262]
Unbound has been updated to version 1.8.1. [r339278]
The timezone database files have been updated to version 2018g. [r339937]
OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1a. [r340711]
Installation and Configuration Tools
The bsdinstall(8) installer and zfsboot(8) boot code have been updated to allow an UEFI+GELI installation option. [r338282] (Sponsored by Klara Systems)
/etc/rc.d Scripts
A new rc(8) has been added to create cfumass(4) LUNs. [r332857] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The geli(8)
rc(8)
script has been updated to include support for a new variable, geli_groups, which provides support to attach multiple providers when set in rc.conf(5)
. [r335673]
The rc(8)
subsystem has been updated to support new keywords in rc.conf(5)
, enable, disable, and delete with rc.d(8)
scripts and the service(8)
utility. See rc.conf(5)
for usage information. [r340348]
(Sponsored by Smule, Inc.)
Runtime Libraries and API
The getrandom(2) system call and getentropy(3) library have been added, compatible with Linux® and OpenBSD implementations. [r331279]
The arc4random(3) library has been updated to match the OpenBSD version 1.35. [r338059]
The libarchive(3) library has been updated to version 3.3.3. [r338600]
ABI Compatibility
get_s(3) has been added. [r331936]
The pthread(3) library has been updated to incorporate POSIX/SUSv4-2018 compliance improvements. [r337992]
The arc4random(3)
library has been updated to remove arc4random_stir() and arc4random_addrandom(). [r338331]
Kernel
This section covers changes to kernel configurations, system tuning, and system control parameters that are not otherwise categorized.
Kernel Bug Fixes
The ACPI subsystem has been updated to implement Device object types for ACPI 6.0 support, required for some Dell, Inc. Poweredge™ AMD® Epyc™ systems. [r326956]
(Sponsored by Dell EMC Isilon)
An issue with IPv6-AH IPSEC padding has been fixed to match RFC4302. [r334625] (Sponsored by Dell EMC Isilon)
The amdsmn(4) and amdtemp(4) drivers have been updated to attach to AMD® Ryzen 2™ host bridges. [r340446]
The amdtemp(4) driver has been updated to fix temperature reporting for AMD® 2990WX CPUs. [r340447]
Kernel Configuration
The VIMAGE kernel configuration option has been enabled by default. [r324810]
The dumpon(8)
utility has been updated to add support for compressed kernel crash dumps when the kernel configuration file includes the GZIO option. See rc.conf(5)
and dumpon(8)
for additional information. [r324965]
(Sponsored by Dell EMC Isilon)
The pmtimer device has been removed from the i386 GENERIC kernel configuration. Its functionality is now part of apm(4)
. [r327774]
The dumpon(8)
utility has been updated to add support for zstd(1)
-compressed kernel crash dumps when the kernel configuration file includes the ZSTDIO option. See rc.conf(5)
and dumpon(8)
for additional information. [r329240]
(Sponsored by Dell EMC Isilon)
A new src.conf(5)
knob, WITH_KERNEL_RETPOLINE, has been added to enable the retpoline mitigation for kernel builds. [r330110]
(Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The EKCD, GZIO, ZSTDIO, and NETDUMP kernel configuration options have been enabled by default for amd64, i386, aarch64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures. [r333890]
A new kernel configuration option, KASSERT_PANIC_OPTIONAL, has been added that allows runtime KASSERT(9)
behavior changes without necessarily invoking panic(9)
. The option is disabled by default. [r338214]
(Sponsored by Dell EMC Isilon)
The NUMA option has been enabled by default in the amd64 GENERIC and MINIMAL kernel configurations. [r338602]
(Sponsored by Dell EMC Isilon, Netflix)
Devices and Drivers
This section covers changes and additions to devices and device drivers since 11.2-RELEASE.
Device Drivers
The random(4)
device has been updated to allow terminating large reads with ^C. [r331070]
(Sponsored by Dell EMC Isilon)
Support for the Microchip® LAN78xx™ USB3-GigE controller has been added. [r333713] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
A new multifunction device has been added to usb_template(4)
, providing mass storage, CDC ACM (serial), and CDC ECM (ethernet) simultaneously. [r333760]
(Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The random(4) driver has been updated to remove the Yarrow algorithm. The Fortuna algorithm remains the default, and now only, available algorithm. [r338324]
The netdump(4) driver has been added, providing a facility through which kernel crash dumps can be transmitted to a remote host after a system panic. See netdump(4) and dumpon(8) for more information and configuration details. [r333283] (Sponsored by Dell EMC Isilon)
The random(4) driver has been updated to fix excessive activity during pseudo-random number generation. [r338292]
Network Drivers
The cxgbe(4)
driver has been updated to provide hardware support for the SO_MAX_PACING_RATE setsockopt(2)
option when the kernel configuration contains the RATELIMIT option. [r334143]
(Sponsored by Chelsio Communications)
Deprecated Drivers
The jedec_ts(4) driver has been removed in 12.0-RELEASE, and its functionality replaced by jedec_dimm(4) . [r337033]
The DRM driver for modern graphics chipsets has been marked deprecated and marked for removal in FreeBSD 13. The DRM kernel modules are available from graphics/drm-stable-kmod or graphics/drm-legacy-kmod in the Ports Collection as well as via pkg(8)
. Additionally, the kernel modules have been added to the lua loader.conf(5)
module_blacklist, as installation from the Ports Collection or pkg(8)
is strongly recommended. [r339218]
Hardware Support
This section covers general hardware support for physical machines, hypervisors, and virtualization environments, as well as hardware changes and updates that do not otherwise fit in other sections of this document.
Hardware Support
Support for powernv POWER9 MMU initialization has been added. [r333273]
Graphics Support
FreeBSD has changed the way graphics drivers are handled on amd64 and i386. Graphics drivers for modern ATI/AMD® and Intel® graphics cards are now available in the Ports Collection. The base drivers are still available and will be installed by default, but they lack support for current generation laptop and desktop systems.
In most cases it is enough to install graphics/drm-kmod from ports or packages to install a driver appropriate for the system, then adding the appropriate driver to kld_list in rc.conf(5)
.
For Intel® (i915) systems after Broadwell™, the rc.conf(5) entry is:
kld_list="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko"
Systems with ATI/AMD® graphics cards have two options. Modern systems starting with the HD7000 series GPU should use:
kld_list="/boot/modules/amdgpu.ko"
Systems with cards released before the HD7000 GPU use:
kld_list="/boot/modules/radeonkms.ko"
Note:
Users must be added to the video GID after installing graphics/drm-kmod in order for X to start properly.
Note:
There are known issues with the xserver driver provided by x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati when using graphics drivers from the base system; x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-legacy should be used instead.
Note:
There is a known issue where booting with UEFI and using the ATI/AMD® graphics driver may cause the screen to be garbled before the appropriate driver is loaded.
For additional information regarding graphics support on FreeBSD, please see the Graphics Wiki Page.
Virtualization Support
Amazon® EC2™ AMI instances now have sysutils/amazon-ssm-agent installed by default, though the service is not enabled by default in rc.conf(5)
. To enable the service, add: [r325254]
>>/etc/rc.conf
amazon_ssm_agent_enable="YES"
to the EC2™ user-data.
Amazon® EC2™ AMI instances now disable ChallengeResponseAuthentication in sshd_config(5)
by default. [r326564]
Amazon® EC2™ AMI instances now use the Amazon® internal NTP service by default. [r326565]
The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add virtio_scsi(4) storage support. [r334940] (Sponsored by iXsystems)
The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add NVMe device emulation. [r335974] (Sponsored by iXsystems)
A new sysctl(8)
, security.jail.vmm_allowed, has been added, which when set to 1 allows bhyve(8)
use within a jail(8)
. [r337023]
(Sponsored by HardenedBSD, G2, Inc.)
Amazon® EC2™ AMI instances now disable the PS/2 keyboard and mouse devices by default, reducing overall boot time by 2.5 seconds. [r338321]
ARM Support
Support for the USB OTG serial terminal has been enabled on arm systems by default. [r335004] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The armv6 and armv7 images now default to boot with EFI. [r336998]
Support has been added for building aarch64 images for the PINE64-LTS system. [r337000]
Support for capsicum(4) has been enabled on armv6 and armv7 by default. [r338666] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
Storage
This section covers changes and additions to file systems and other storage subsystems, both local and networked.
General Storage
The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to support check hashes to cylinder-group maps. Support for check hashes is available only for UFS2. [r323923]
The CAM Target Layer (CTL) frontend and backend options have been overhauled to use nv(3) allowing creating multiple ioctl(2) frontend ports. [r333446] (Sponsored by iXsystems)
The default auto_master(5)
configuration has been updated to add the noautoro automont(8)
flag to the /media mount point (commented by default). [r337749]
(Sponsored by DARPA, AFRL)
The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer TRIM messages being sent simultaneously. [r338056]
(Sponsored by Netflix)
TRIM consolidation support has been enabled by default in the UFS/FFS filesystem. TRIM consolidation can be disabled by setting the vfs.ffs.dotrimcons sysctl(8)
to 0, or adding vfs.ffs.dotrimcons=0 to sysctl.conf(5)
. [r338517]
(Sponsored by Netflix)
Networked Storage
The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server support. [r335012]
Boot Loader Changes
This section covers the boot loader, boot menu, and other boot-related changes.
Boot Loader Changes
The lua loader(8) has been updated to detect a list of installed kernels to boot. [r329501] (Sponsored by Dell EMC Isilon)
The loader(8) has been updated to support geli(8) for all architectures and all disk-like devices. [r336252] (Sponsored by Microchip Technology, Inc.)
The init(8) utility has been updated to be able to run an executable written in languages other than sh(1) , such as Python, for example. [r337321] (Sponsored by DARPA, AFRL)
The loader(8) has been updated to add support for loading Intel® microcode updates early during the boot process. [r337715] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
A new kenv(1)
variable, init_exec, has been added to loader(8)
which allows init(8)
to execute a file after opening the console, replacing init(8)
as PID 1. [r337740]
(Sponsored by DARPA, AFRL)
The default libstand(3) interpreter has been changed to Lua. [r338050]
The default lua loader.conf(5)
has been updated to include the kernels_autodetect option, which defaults to YES, supplementing the loader(8)
support to list available kernels to boot introduced in revision 329501. [r339308]
Networking
This section describes changes that affect networking in FreeBSD.
General Network
The carp(4)
interface has been updated to keep the state as INIT instead of MASTER when the net.inet.carp.allow sysctl(8)
is set to 0. [r333322]
(Sponsored by iXsystems)
The pf(4) packet filter has been updated to use rmlock(9) instead of rwlock(9) , resulting in significant performance improvements. [r334375]
The SO_REUSEPORT_LB option has been added to the network stack, allowing multiple programs or threads to bind to the same port, and incoming connections load balanced using a hash function. [r334719]
(Sponsored by Limelight Networks)
The pf(4)
ioctl interface and pfctl(8)
now support altq(4)
bandwidth parameters of 2^32 bps or greater. The HFSC discipline has been upgraded to operate correctly with bandwidth parameters up to 100 Gbps, and bandwidth parameters supplied to the non-upgraded disciplines will now be saturated at the prior 32-bit limit. [r338253]
Ports Collection and Package Infrastructure
This section covers changes to the FreeBSD Ports Collection, package infrastructure, and package maintenance and installation tools.
Packaging Changes
The pkg(8) utility has been updated to verson 1.10.5_5.
KDE has been updated to version 5.12.5.
Perl has been updated to version 5.26.2.
Python has been updated to version 2.7.
Documentation
Release Engineering and Integration
This section convers changes that are specific to the FreeBSD Release Engineering processes.
Integration Changes
The FreeBSD/i386 memory stick installation images have been changed to use the MBR partitioning scheme instead of GPT to address boot issues with some BIOSes. [r332446] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
The FreeBSD/amd64 memory stick installation images have been changed to use the MBR partitioning scheme instead of GPT to address boot issues with some BIOSes. [r334337] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)
Last modified on: June 19, 2021 by Danilo G. Baio