Thursday, September 12, 2013

FreeBSD 9.2-RC4 Now Available

FreeBSD 9.2-RC4 has been announced. Refer to the announcement for the checksums for each file.

The fourth release candidate builds of the 9.2-RELEASE release cycle are now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures.

ISO images and, for architectures that support it, the memory stick images
are available here.

If you notice problems you can report them through the normal GNATS PR system or here on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system use "releng/9.2".

Please be aware that cvsup and CVS are both deprecated, and are not supported methods of updating the src/ tree.

Changes between -RC3 and -RC4 include:

  • Revert the tribute boot loader logo as the default logo.
  • Fix a filesystem bug that would cause removed files to fail to dereference vnodes until the filesystem was forcibly unmounted and remounted.
  • Fix a rtadvd(8) segmentation fault on service reload.
  • Create and correct ownership and permissions of /var/authpf in the standard mtree.
  • Fix a NFS deadlock.
  • Stop SIOCSIFADDR, SIOCSIFBRDADDR, SIOCSIFDSTADDR and SIOCSIFNETMASK at the socket layer rather than pass them on to the link layer without validation or credential checks.  [SA-13:12]
  • Prevent cross-mount hardlinks between different nullfs mounts of the same underlying filesystem.  [SA-13:13]
  • Fix the length calculation for the final block of a sendfile(2) transmission which could be tricked into rounding up to the nearest page size, leaking up to a page of kernel memory.  [SA-13:11]

The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64 and i386 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases.  Systems running earlier FreeBSD releases can upgrade as follows:


# freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.2-RC4

During this process, FreeBSD Update may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install

It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 8.x.  Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat8x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now