$FreeBSD: src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/relnotes/common/new.sgml,v 1.22.2.355 2003/05/23 15:05:23 bmah Exp $ $DragonFly: src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/relnotes/common/Attic/new.sgml,v 1.2 2003/06/17 04:27:19 dillon Exp $ The FreeBSD Project 2000 2001 2002 2003 The FreeBSD Documentation Project The release notes for &os; &release.current; contain a summary of the changes made to the &os; base system since &release.prev;. Both changes for kernel and userland are listed, as well as applicable security advisories for the base system that were issued since the last release. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented. This document contains the release notes for &os; &release.current; on the &arch.print; hardware platform. It describes new features of &os; that have been added (or changed) since &release.prev;. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of &os;. The &release.type; distribution to which these release notes apply represents a point along the &release.branch; development branch between &release.prev; and the future &release.next;. Some pre-built, binary &release.type; distributions along this branch can be found at . ]]> This distribution of &os; &release.current; is a &release.type; distribution. It can be found at or any of its mirrors. More information on obtaining this (or other) &release.type; distributions of &os; can be found in the Obtaining FreeBSD appendix in the FreeBSD Handbook. ]]> This section describes the most user-visible new or changed features in &os; since &release.prev;. Typical release note items document new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options, major bugfixes, or contributed software upgrades. Security advisories for the base system that were issued after &release.prev; are also listed. A remotely-exploitable buffer overflow vulnerability in sendmail has been fixed. For more details, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:07. In &os; &release.prev;, this vulnerability was fixed using a vendor-supplied patch (but too late for inclusion in the release notes). In &os; &release.current;, it has been fixed with the import of a new version of sendmail. A bug which prevented the kernel from booting on an Intel 80386 processor has been corrected. A new DIRECTIO kernel option enables support for read operations that bypass the buffer cache and put data directly into a userland buffer. This feature requires that the O_DIRECT flag is set on the file descriptor and that both the offset and length for the read operation are multiples of the physical media sector size. &man.uudecode.1; and &man.b64decode.1; now support a -r flag for decoding raw (or broken) files that may be missing the initial and possibly final framing lines. sendmail has been updated to version 8.12.9. The timezone database has been updated from tzdata2002d to tzdata2003a. The supported release of GNOME has been updated to 2.2.1. The supported release of KDE has been updated to 3.1.1a. If you're upgrading from a previous release of &os;, you generally will have three options: Using the binary upgrade option of &man.sysinstall.8;. This option is perhaps the quickest, although it presumes that your installation of &os; uses no special compilation options. Performing a complete reinstall of &os;. Technically, this is not an upgrading method, and in any case is usually less convenient than a binary upgrade, in that it requires you to manually backup and restore the contents of /etc. However, it may be useful in cases where you want (or need) to change the partitioning of your disks. From source code in /usr/src. This route is more flexible, but requires more disk space, time, and technical expertise. More information can be found in the Using make world section of the FreeBSD Handbook. Upgrading from very old versions of &os; may be problematic; in cases like this, it is usually more effective to perform a binary upgrade or a complete reinstall. Please read the INSTALL.TXT file for more information, preferably before beginning an upgrade. If you are upgrading from source, please be sure to read /usr/src/UPDATING as well. Finally, if you want to use one of various means to track the -STABLE or -CURRENT branches of &os;, please be sure to consult the -CURRENT vs. -STABLE section of the FreeBSD Handbook. Upgrading &os; should, of course, only be attempted after backing up all data and configuration files.