FreeBSD/alpha 6.0-RELEASE Release Notes

2.1 Security Advisories

A bug in the fetch(1) utility, which allows a malicious HTTP server to cause arbitrary portions of the client's memory to be overwritten, has been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-04:16.fetch. [MERGED]

A bug in procfs(5) and linprocfs(5) which could allow a malicious local user to read parts of kernel memory or perform a local denial of service attack by causing a system panic, has been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-04:17.procfs. [MERGED]

Two buffer overflows in the TELNET client program have been corrected. They could have allowed a malicious TELNET server or an active network attacker to cause telnet(1) to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running it. More information can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:01.telnet. [MERGED]

An information disclosure vulnerability in the sendfile(2) system call, which could permit it to transmit random parts of kernel memory, has been fixed. More details are in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:02.sendfile. [MERGED]

An information leak vulnerability in the SIOCGIFCONF ioctl(2), which leaked 12 bytes of kernel memory, has been fixed. More details are in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:04.ifconf. [MERGED]

Several programming errors in cvs(1), which could potentially cause arbitrary code to be executed on CVS servers, have been corrected. Further information can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:05.cvs. [MERGED]

An error in the default permissions on the /dev/iir device node, which allowed unprivileged local users can send commands to the hardware supported by the iir(4) driver, has been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:06.iir. [MERGED]

A bug in the validation of i386_get_ldt(2) system call input arguments, which may allow kernel memory to be disclosed to a user process, has been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:07.ldt. [MERGED]

Several information disclosure vulnerabilities in various parts of the kernel have been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:08.kmem. [MERGED]

A bug in the tcpdump(1) utility which allows a malicious remote user to cause a denial-of-service by using specially crafted packets, has been fixed. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:10.tcpdump. [MERGED]

Two problems in the gzip(1) utility have been fixed. These may allow a local user to modify permissions of arbitrary files and overwrite arbitrary local files when uncompressing a file. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:11.gzip. [MERGED]

A bug in BIND 9 DNSSEC has been fixed. When DNSSEC is enabled, this bug may allow a remote attacker to inject a specially crafted packet which will cause named(8) to terminate. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:12.bind9. [MERGED]

A bug has been fixed in ipfw(4) that could cause packets to be matched incorrectly against a lookup table. This bug only affects SMP machines or UP machines that have the PREEMPTION kernel option enabled. More information is contained in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:13.ipfw. [MERGED]

Two security-related problems have been fixed in bzip2(1). These include a potential denial of service and unauthorized manipulation of file permissions. For more information, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:14.bzip2. [MERGED]

Two problems in FreeBSD's TCP stack have been fixed. They could allow attackers to stall existing TCP connections, creating a denial-of-service situation. More information is contained in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-05:15.tcp. [MERGED]

2.2 Kernel Changes

The kernel debugger ddb(4) now supports a show alllocks command, which dumps a list of processes and threads currently holding sleep mutexes (and spin mutexes for the current thread). [MERGED]

The ichsmb(4) driver is now available as a loadable kernel module.

The jail(8) feature now supports a new sysctl security.jail.chflags_allowed, which controls the behavior of chflags(1) within a jail. If set to 0 (the default), then a jailed root user is treated as an unprivileged user; if set to 1, then a jailed root user is treated the same as an unjailed root user. [MERGED]

A sysctl security.jail.getfsstatroot_only has been renamed to security.jail.enforce_statfs and now supports the following policies:

The loader tunable debug.mpsafevm has been enabled by default. [MERGED]

memguard(9), a kernel memory allocator designed to help detect “tamper-after-free” scenarios, has been added. This must be explicitly enabled via options DEBUG_MEMGUARD, plus small kernel modifications. It is generally intended for use by kernel developers.

struct ifnet and the network interface API have been changed. Due to ABI incompatibility, all drivers not in the FreeBSD base system need to be updated to use the new API and recompiled.

A number of bugs have been fixed in the ULE scheduler. [MERGED]

Fine-grained locking to allow much of the VFS stack to run without the Giant lock has been added. This is enabled by default on the alpha, amd64, and i386 architectures, and can be disabled by setting the loader tunable (and sysctl variable) debug.mpsafevfs to 0.

System V IPC objects (message queues, semaphores, and shared memory) now have support for Mandatory Access Control policies, notably mac_biba(4), mac_mls(4), mac_stub(4), and mac_test(4).

The sysctl(3) MIBs beginning with “debug” now require the kernel option options SYSCTL_DEBUG. This option is disabled by default.

The generic tty(4) driver interface has been added and many device drivers including cx(4) ({tty,cua}x), cy(4) ({tty,cua}c), digi(4) ({tty,cua}D), rc(4) ({tty,cua}m), rp(4) ({tty,cua}R), sab(4) ({tty,cua}z), si(4) ({tty,cua}A), sio(4) ({tty,cua}d), sx ({tty,cua}G), uart(4) ({tty,cua}u), ubser(4) ({tty,cua}y), ucom(4) ({tty,cua}U), and ucycom(4) ({tty,cua}y) have been rewritten to use it. Note that /etc/remote and /etc/ttys have been updated as well.

The vkbd(4) driver has been added. This driver provides a software loopback mechanism that can implement a virtual AT keyboard similar to what the pty(4) driver does for terminals.

The maximum length of shell commands has changed from 128 bytes to PAGE_SIZE. By default, this value is either 4KB (i386, pc98, amd64, and powerpc) or 8KB (sparc64 and ia64). As a result, compatibility modules need to be rebuilt to stay synchronized with data structure changes in the kernel.

A new tunable vm.blacklist has been added. This can hold a space or comma separated list of physical addresses. The pages containing these physical addresses will not be added to the free list and thus will effectively be ignored by the FreeBSD VM system. The physical addresses of any ignored pages are listed in the message buffer as well.

# route add 10.1.1.1 -inet6 fe80::1%fxp0

2.3 Userland Changes

The bsdiff(1) and bspatch(1) binary diff and binary patching tools have been added.

The burncd(8) utility now allows commands (such as eject) to take place after fixating a disk.

The chflags(1) utility now supports the -h flag, which supports changing flags on symbolic links.

The env(1) program now supports a -v flag to write the command to standard error before it is executed.

The env(1) program now supports a -S string option to split the string and pass them to the command as the command-line arguments.

The env(1) program now supports a -P altpath option to set the command search path used to look for the command.

The ftpd(8) program now uses the 212 and 213 status codes for directory and file status correctly (211 was used in the previous versions). This behavior is described in RFC 959. [MERGED]

The create command of the gpt(8) utility now supports a -f command-line flag to force creation of a GPT even when there is an MBR record on a disk. [MERGED]

The getaddrinfo(3) function now queries A DNS resource records before AAAA records when AF_UNSPEC is specified. Some broken DNS servers return NXDOMAIN against non-existent AAAA queries, even when it should return NOERROR with empty return records. This is a problem for an IPv4/IPv6 dual stack node because the NXDOMAIN returned by the first query of an AAAA record makes the querying server stop attempting to resolve the A record if any. Also, this behavior has been recognized as a potential denial-of-service attack (see http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/714121 for more details). Note that although the query order has been changed, the returned result still includes AF_INET6 records before AF_INET records. [MERGED]

The gethostbyname(3), gethostbyname2(3), and gethostbyaddr(3) functions are now thread-safe. [MERGED]

The getnetent(3), getnetbyname(3), and getnetbyaddr(3) functions are now thread-safe. [MERGED]

The getprotoent(3), getprotobyname(3), and getprotobynumber(3) functions are now thread-safe. [MERGED]

The getservent(3), getservbyname(3), and getservbyport(3) functions are now thread-safe. [MERGED]

For conformation to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (also known as POSIX 2001), the n_net member of struct netent and the first argument of getnetbyaddr(3) has been changed to an uint32_t. Due to these changes, the ABI on 64-bit platforms is incompatible with previous releases of FreeBSD and the major version number of the libpcap shared library has been bumped. On 64-bit platforms being upgraded from older FreeBSD versions, all userland programs that use getnetbyaddr(3), getnetbyname(3), getnetent(3), and/or libpcap have to be recompiled.

The gvinum(8) utility now supports the checkparity, rebuildparity, and setstate subcommands. [MERGED]

The ifconfig(8) utility has been restructured. It is now more modular and flexible with respect to supporting interface-specific functionality. The 802.11 support has been updated to support recent changes to the 802.11 subsystem and drivers.

The ifconfig(8) utility now supports a -tunnel parameter, which is just an alias for deletetunnel, yet is more convenient and easier to type.

The -vlandev parameter to ifconfig(8) no longer requires a network interface as its argument. The argument still is supported for backward compatibility, but now it is deprecated and its use is discouraged.

Support for abbreviated forms of a number of ipfw(8) options has been deprecated. Warnings are printed to stderr indicating the correct full form when one of these abbreviations is detected.

The kldstat(8) utility now supports a -m option to return the status of a specific kernel module. [MERGED]

The on-disk format of LC_CTYPE files has been changed to be machine-independent.

The libkvm now supports ELF crash dumps on amd64 and i386 platforms, large crash dumps (more than 4GB) on 32-bit platforms, and PAE crash dumps on i386 platform.

The mixer(8) utility now supports the -S option. This is the same as the -s option but does not output mixing field separators.

A bug in the libalias library which causes a core dump when the -reverse option is specified in natd(8) has been fixed.

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). [MERGED]

The libarchive library now supports handling a ZIP archive entry with more than 4GB compressed size (ZIP64 extension) and Unix extension.

The libgpib library has been added to give userland access to GPIB devices (using the the pcii driver) via the ibfoo API. [MERGED]

The default stack sizes in libpthread, libthr, and libc_r have been increased. On 32-bit platforms, the main thread receives a 2MB stack size by default, with other threads receiving a 1MB stack size by default. On 64-bit platforms, the default stack sizes are 4MB and 2MB respectively. [MERGED]

The libxpg4 library has been removed because all of its functionality was long ago merged into libc. All binaries linked with libxpg4 must be recompiled or use libmap.conf(5). Note that the FreeBSD base system has no such binaries.

The lpd(8) program now checks to make sure the data file has been completely transfered before starting to print it when a data file received from some other host. Some implementations of lpr(1) send the control file for a print job before sending the matching data files, which can cause problems if the receiving host is a busy print-server. [MERGED]

A number of new functions have been implemented in the math(3) library. These include ceill(3), floorl(3), ilogbl(3), fma(3) and variants, lrint(3) and variants, and lround(3) and variants. [MERGED]

The mknod(8) utility is now deprecated. Device nodes have been managed by the devfs(5) device file system since FreeBSD 5.0.

The moused(8) daemon now supports “virtual scrolling”, in which mouse motions made while holding down the middle mouse button are interpreted as scrolling. This feature is enabled with the -V flag. [MERGED]

A separate directory has been added for named(8) dynamic zones which is owned by the bind user (for creation of the zone journal file). For more detail, see an example dynamic zone in the sample named.conf(5). [MERGED]

The ncal(1) utility now supports a -m flag to generate a calendar for a specified month in the current year. [MERGED]

The newfs(8) utility now supports a -n flag to suppress the creation of a .snap directory on new file systems. This feature is intended for use on memory or vnode file systems that will not require snapshot support. [MERGED]

The newfs(8) utility now emits a warning when creating a UFS or UFS2 file system that cannot support snapshots. This situation can occur in the case of very large file systems with small block sizes. [MERGED]

The newsyslog(8) utility now supports a -d option to specify an alternate root for log files similar to DESTDIR in the BSD make process. This only affects log file paths, not configuration file (-f) or archive directory (-a) paths.

The newsyslog(8) utility now supports a -N that causes it not to rotate any files.

The NO_NIS compile-time knob for userland has been added. As its name implies, enabling this Makefile variable will cause NIS support to be excluded from various programs and will cause the NIS utilities to not be built. [MERGED]

For years, FreeBSD has used Makefile variables of the form NOFOO and NO_FOO. For consistency, those variables using the former naming convention have been converted to the NO_FOO form. The file /usr/share/mk/bsd.compat.mk has a complete list of these variables; it also implements some temporary backward compatibility for the old names.

The periodic(8) security output now supports the display of information about blocked packet counts from pf(4). [MERGED]

The pgrep(1) command now supports a -S option which allows matching system processes (kernel threads).

The pgrep(1) and pkill(1) commands now support a -F option, which matches a process whose PID is stored in a file.

The pgrep(1) and pkill(1) commands now support a -i option to ignore case in the process match.

The pgrep(1) and pkill(1) commands now support a -j option that matches processes based on their jail(2) ID.

The pgrep(1) and pkill(1) commands now support a -o option which matches only the oldest (least recently started) of the matching processes.

The portsnap(8) utility for downloading, updating, and extracting compressed snapshots of the FreeBSD ports tree has been added.

The powerd(8) program for managing power consumption has been added.

The ppp(8) program now implements an echo parameter, which allows LCP ECHOs to be enabled independently of LQR reports. Older versions of ppp(8) would revert to LCP ECHO mode on negotiation failure. It is now necessary to specify enable echo to get this behavior. [MERGED]

The disable NAS-IP-Address and disable NAS-Identifier options, which support pre-RFC 2865 RADIUS servers have been added to the ppp(8) program.

Two bugs in the pppd(8) program have been fixed. They may result in an incorrect CBCP response, which violates the Microsoft PPP Callback Control Protocol section 3.2. [MERGED]

The ps(1) utility now supports a jid keyword in the -o option. It displays the jail(2) ID of each process.

The pstat(8) program now supports a -h option to print swap sizes with SI prefixes such as K, M, and G, which are used to form binary multiples.

The rescue(8) utilities in the /rescue directory now include bsdtar(1) instead of GNU tar.

The restore(8) utility has regained the ability to read FreeBSD version 1 dump tapes. [MERGED]

A bug of the rexecd(8) utility which results in it behaving as if the -i option is always specified has been fixed. [MERGED]

The rexecd(8) utility has been removed. There are no rexec clients in the FreeBSD tree, and the client function rexec(3) is present only in libcompat.

The rm(1) utility now supports an -I option that asks for confirmation (once) if recursively removing directories or if more than 3 files are listed in the command line. [MERGED]

The rm(1) utility now suppresses diagnostic messages when it attempts to remove a non-existent directory with the -r and -f options specified. This behavior is required by Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification (SUSv3).

The following ISO/IEC 9899:1999 standard functions have been implemented: roundl(), lroundl(), llroundl(), truncl(), and floorl().

An rpmatch(3) library function has been added to check a string for being an affirmative or negative response in the current locale.

The rtld(1) dynamic linker now supports specifying library replacements via the LD_LIBMAP environment variable. This variable will override the entries in libmap.conf(5). [MERGED]

The rune(3) non-standard multibyte and wide character support interface has been removed.

sed(1) now supports a -l option to make its output line-buffered. [MERGED]

The strftime(3) function now supports some GNU extensions such as - (no padding), _ (use space as padding), and 0 (zero padding). [MERGED]

The syslog(3) function is now thread-safe. [MERGED]

The syslogd(8) utility now opens an additional domain socket (/var/run/logpriv by default), with 0600 permissions to be used by privileged programs. This prevents privileged programs from locking when the domain sockets run out of buffer space due to a local denial-of-service attack. [MERGED]

The syslogd(8) now supports the -S option, which changes the pathname of the privileged socket. This is useful for preventing the daemon from receiving any messages from the local sockets (/var/run/log and /var/run/logpriv are used by default). [MERGED]

The syslogd(8) utility now allows : and % characters in the hostname specifications. These characters are used in IPv6 addresses and scope IDs. [MERGED]

The systat(1) -netstat display is now IPv6-aware. [MERGED]

The -f option of tail(1) utility now supports more than one file at a time. [MERGED]

The telnet(1) and telnetd(8) programs now support the -S option for specifying a numeric TOS byte.

Prepending a + character to port numbers passed to telnet(1) program will now disable option negotiation and allow the transfer of characters with the high bit set. This feature is intended to support the fairly common use of telnet(1) as a protocol tester.

The tcpdrop(8) command, which closes a selected TCP connection, has been added. It was obtained from OpenBSD. [MERGED]

what(1) now supports a -q flag, which causes it to print matching text, but not format it.

whois(1) now supports a -k flag for querying whois.krnic.net (the National Internet Development Agency of Korea), which holds details of IP address allocations within Korea. [MERGED]

The -I option of the xargs(1) command has been changed to conform to IEEE Std 1003.1-2004. The standard requires that the constructed arguments cannot grow larger than 255 bytes.

A bug, which caused the last line of configuration files such as hosts(5), services(5), and so on to be ignored if it did not end in a newline character, has been fixed. [MERGED]

A new system user/group _dhcp has been added to support dhclient(8) from OpenBSD.

ifconfig_fxp0_name="net0"
ifconfig_net0="inet 10.0.0.1/16"

# /etc/rc.d/moused start ums0

moused_ums0_enable=yes
moused_ums0_flags="-z 4"
moused_ums0_port="/dev/ums0"

2.4 Contributed Software

awk has been updated from the 7 February 2004 release to the 24 April 2005 release.

BIND has been updated from version 9.3.0 to version 9.3.1. [MERGED]

bsnmp has been updated from 1.7 to 1.10.

bzip2 has been updated from 1.0.2 to 1.0.3.

OpenBSD dhclient as of OpenBSD 3.7 has been imported. It replaces the ISC DHCP client used in prior versions of FreeBSD.

FILE has been updated from 4.10 to 4.12.

GNU GCC has been updated from from 3.4.2-prerelease as of 28 July, 2004 to 3.4.4.

A number of bug fixes and performance enhancements have been added to GNU grep in the form of patches from Fedora's grep-2.5.1-48 source RPM.

GNU readline has been updated from version 4.3 to version 5.0.

IPFilter has been updated from 3.4.35 to 4.1.18.

Heimdal has been updated from 0.6.1 to 0.6.3. [MERGED]

The hostapd v0.3.9 has been imported. This is a user space IEEE 802.11 AP and IEEE 802.1X/WPA/WPA2/EAP Authenticator and RADIUS authentication server. For more details, see hostapd(8).

libpcap has been updated from v0.8.3 to v0.9.1 (alpha 096).

libregex has been updated from a snapshot from GNU grep 2.5.1 to a snapshot from the fedora-glibc-2_3_4-21 tag in the glibc CVS repository.

libz has been updated from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2.

lukemftp has been updated from a 26 April 2004 snapshot from NetBSD's sources to a snapshot as of 16 May 2005.

A snapshot of netcat from OpenBSD as of 4 February 2005 has been added. More information can be found in the nc(1) manual page. [MERGED]

NgATM has been updated from 1.0 to 1.2.

OpenPAM has been updated from the Eelgrass release to the Figwort release.

OpenSSH has been updated from 3.8p1 to 4.1p1.

OpenSSL has been updated from 0.9.7d to 0.9.7e. [MERGED]

pf has been updated from the version included with OpenBSD 3.5 to the version included with OpenBSD 3.7.

sendmail has been updated from version 8.13.3 to version 8.13.4. It now supports OSTYPE(freebsd6).

tcpdump has been updated from v3.8.3 to v3.9.1 (alpha 096).

tcsh has been updated from 6.13.00 to 6.14.00.

texinfo has been updated from 4.6 to 4.8.

The timezone database has been updated from the tzdata2004e release to the tzdata2004g release. [MERGED]

The WPA Supplicant v0.3.9 has been imported. This provides WPA Supplicant component of WPA/IEEE 802.11i features. For more details, see wpa_supplicant(8).

2.5 Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure

The pkg_create(1) utility now supports a -R flag. When creating a package file from the locally installed package, it creates package files for all packages on which that locally installed package depends if this flag is specified.

The pkg_version(1) utility now supports a -q flag to suppress the output of the port version comparison characters <, =, and >.

The pkg_version(1) utility now supports a -I flag, which causes only the INDEX file to be used for determining if a package is out of date. [MERGED]

The ports/INDEX* files, which kept an index of all of the entries in the ports collection, have been removed from the CVS repository. [MERGED] These files were generated only infrequently, and therefore were usually out-of-date and inaccurate. Users requiring an index file (such as for use by programs such as portupgrade(1)) have two alternatives for obtaining a copy:

• Build an index file based on the current ports tree by running make index from the top of the ports/ tree.

• Fetch an index file over the network by running make fetchindex from the top of the ports/ tree. This index file will (typically) be accurate to within a day.

2.6 Release Engineering and Integration

In prior FreeBSD releases, the disc1 CD-ROM (or ISO image) was a bootable installation disk containing the base system, ports tree, and common packages. The disc2 CD-ROM (or ISO image) was a bootable “fix it” disk with a live filesystem, to be used for making emergency repairs. This layout has now changed. For all architectures except ia64, the disc1 image now contains the base system distribution files, ports tree, and the live filesystem, making it suitable for both an initial installation and repair purposes. (On the ia64, the live filesystem is on a separate disk due to its size.) Packages appear on separate disks; in particular, the disc2 image contains commonly packages such as desktop environments. Documents from the FreeBSD Documentation Project also appear on disc2. [MERGED]

The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment has been updated from 2.6.2 to 2.10.2. More information about running GNOME on FreeBSD can be found on the FreeBSD GNOME Project Web page. [MERGED]

The supported version of the KDE desktop environment has been updated from 3.3.0 to 3.4.2. More information regarding running KDE on FreeBSD can be found on the KDE on FreeBSD Web page. [MERGED]

The supported version of Xorg has been updated from 6.7.0 to 6.8.2. [MERGED]

2.7 Documentation

Documentation of existing functionality has been improved by the addition of the following manual pages: acpi_ibm(4), acpi_sony(4), ataraid(4), bus_space(9), central(4), clkbrd(4), creator(4), devfs.conf(5), devfs.rules(5), ebus(4), eeprom(4), fhc(4), machfb(4), ofw_console(4), openfirm(4), openprom(4), pmap_page_init(9), pthread_atfork(3), rtc(4), sbus(4), sched_4bsd(4), sched_ule(4), snd_fm801(4), snd_neomagic(4), snd_t4dwave(4), snd_via8233(4), snd_via82c686(4), and snd_vibes(4).

Manual pages in the base system have received a number of cleanups, both for content and presentation. Cross-references are more correct and consistent, standard section headings are now used throughout, and markup has been cleaned up.

The following manual pages, which were derived from RFCs and possibly violate the IETF's copyrights, have been replaced: gai_strerror(3), getaddrinfo(3), getnameinfo(3), inet6_opt_init(3), inet6_option_space(3), inet6_rth_space(3), inet6_rthdr_space(3), icmp6(4), and ip6(4). [MERGED]