FreeBSD today released version 5.4. This looks like a pretty good release mostly for some changes to userland tools and some firewalling bits, some of the highlights for me are:
- CARP from OpenBSD has been added, this allows for some nice shared IP addresses between machines with failover carp(4)
- The ipfw(8) ipfw fwd rule now supports the full packet destination manipulation when the kernel option options IPFIREWALL_FORWARD_EXTENDED is specified in addition to options IPFIREWALL_FORWARD. This kernel option disables all restrictions to ensure proper behavior for locally generated packets and allows redirection of packets destined to locally configured IP addresses.
- The libarchive library (as well as the tar(1) command that uses it) now has support for reading ISO images (with optional RockRidge extensions) and ZIP archives (with deflate and none compression).
- The -f option of tail(1) utility now supports more than one file at a time.
- rc.conf(5) now supports changes of network interface names at boot time.
There are a whole bunch of other interesting changes, be sure to read the Migration Guide before attempting to upgrade.
