With FreeBSD 6.0 now officially released I thought I’ll go through the Release Notes and post a few of the things I found useful from it.
The release notes list a LOT of changes and I’ve already noted a few that isn’t mentioned. This might be a easy upgrade but it’s a significant mile stone.
- 80386 processors are not supported anymore.
- A new sysctl called security.jail.enforce_statfs that controls what mounts are visible in a jail, I recommend setting this to 1 if you are using nullfs to share directories that way jail users can see for themselves that certain directories are mounted read only for example.
- The IPDIVERT kernel option now causes a module to be built that is loadable at run time! Also libalias now supports being built as a kernel module.
- ipfw have a option to only match packets for a given jailid, this is now support with mpsafenet=1
- ipfw can now tag altq packets
- bsdiff(1) and bsdpatch(1) has been added for binary diffs and patching
- libarchive and therefore bsd tar now supports ISO files and ZIP files, try tar -tvzf blah.zip and tar -tvf blah.iso to see this in action, fantastic!
- Two utilities – pgrep(1) and pkill(1) has some new options, these utilities makes it easy to find and kill processes by name
- The fantastic portsnap(8) utility is now installed by default. This replaces the old cvsup method of keeping your ports tree in sync and is well worth investigating. It’s been the first thing I installed on any new box for a long time, great to see it included by default.
- tcpdrop(8) has been added that enables you to reset any TCP session, very handy indeed.
- rc.d scripts can now rename network interfaces at boot time using ifconfig_fxp0_name=”net0″ syntax.
So that’s just some of the highlights, there are loads more, and lots of work has gone in under the hood to improve threading and SMP from the 5.x branch, this should help with some concerns that were raised on the performance of 5.x series of FreeBSD.
