• WhatsNew
• FreeBSD11

**************** ATTENTION **************** Please keep the entries in this page sorted first according to the section, then by reverse date, so that the latest / newest additions are at the top of their respective sections. **************** ATTENTION ****************

These are not Release Notes! This is an informal list of changes which are considered important or interesting to the users of FreeBSD. As such, they may contain incomplete or wrong information. If you are a developer, please keep this page updated!

See also:

• What's cooking for FreeBSD 7

• What's cooking for FreeBSD 8

• What's cooking for FreeBSD 9

• What's new for FreeBSD 10

The intent is for this page to collect major, user-visible changes to FreeBSD while in the development cycle for FreeBSD 11, no matter if the changes are eventually MFC-ed to earlier versions.

What's new for FreeBSD 11

Overall system / architectural changes

(architecture as in "the overall design of the system", not in the sense of "ARM vs x64")

• Support for C blocks imported from Apple GCC (r260311, tutorial)

• New automounter with Sun-compatible map format, proper kernel support and LDAP integration (r270096)

Kernel, hardware support & other low level improvements

• LIBCOMPILER_RT has replaced LIBGCC on all platforms (r260849)

• MK_TESTS is enabled by default (r267424)

• Support for calling pcibios routines from the bootloader (r271406)

• A thin wrapper around the kernel interface to make it easier to write GPIO applications has been added (r274987)

• man(1) has been changed to use mandoc to render manpages (r274901)

• devctl, a new-bus device control utility which allows the user to request administrative changes to individual devices (r278320)

Networking improvements

• Support for linking NIC Receive Side Scaling (RSS) to the network stack's connection-group implementation (r263198)

• Support for the UDP-Lite protocol (RFC 3828) has been added to both IPv4 and IPv6 stacks (r264212)

• IPX is no longer supported (r263140)

• AppleTalk is no longer supported (r263152)

• Flowid, bindmulti and RSS awareness have been added to the IPv6 stack (r268562)

• RSS awareness has been added to the igb(4) driver (r268028)

• RSS awareness has been added to the ixgbe(4) driver (r268029)

• netstat can display RSS and flow information with -R (r266448)

• PF hash has been changed from Jenkins to Murmur3 which shows a conservative 3% increase in packets per second (r272906)

• Netmap support has been added to libpcap allowing tcpdump and other native pcap application to run directly on netmap ports (r272659)

• faith(4) and faithd(8) have been removed from base (r274331)

• cxgbe(4) will now front loads as much as possible before any driver lock or software queue gets involved (r276485)

A new version of NetMap

Most relevant features:

• netmap pipes, providing bidirectional blocking I/O while moving 100+ Mpps between processes using shared memory channels
• kqueue support and segmentation offloading for VALE switch (both used in bhyve)
• improved user library
• netmap emulation on any NIC, even those without native netmap support (even with emulation the performance is better than BPF)
• seamless interconnection of VALE switch, NICs and host stack.
• THE USER API HAS SLIGHTLY CHANGED (head/cur/tail pointers instead of pointers/count as before)

ARM improvements

• The nand(4) device is enabled for ARM devices by default. (r260921)

• Support for the Display Control Unit (DCU4) Freescale Vybrid (r261413)

• Support for the Colibri VF50 Evaluation Board (r261411)

• Support for the Freescale Synchronous Audio Interface. (r261982)

• Support for accessing the imx6 on-chip one-time-programmble data. (r261938)

• Support for the Samsung Chromebook (r263427)

• Support for the Samsung Chromebook2 (r269369)

• Support for programming FPGA cores from userspace (r271186)

• Support for the Broadcom's VideoCore IV GPU (r278277)

• DTrace support has been added to ARM32 (r278529)

ARM64

• Still in development, expected to be imported before a stable branch is created for 11.0

PowerPC improvements

• The default scheduler on MPC85XX architectures has been switched to ULE (r261358)

• The Power Management Unit is now supported on the Apple PowerBook G4 (r260872)

• Support for the ADT7460/ADT7467 fan controller found in later PowerBooks and iBooks (r261421)

• Support for hwpmc(4) on ppc970 (PowerMac G5) (r261342)

• Improved support for ATI backlights (r264205 & r264207)

• Improved page zeroing performance in the 32-bit AIM MMU (r261258)

• X11 via xf86-video-scfb supported on the Playstation 3 (r268895)

• /etc/rc.d/power_profile can monitor the battery and AC status on PowerPC laptops (r273009)

• Support for cxgbe(4) on powerpc64 has been added (r277230)

Sparc64 improvements

• Support for vt(4) on a variety of low-end graphics hardware (SBus adapters, Mach64, QEMU's framebuffer, XVR-100 (r269415)

Virtualization Improvements

BHyVe Improvements

• bhyve can boot FreeBSD/i386 guests (r261504)

• Support for PCI legacy INTx interrupts have been improved in bhyve (r261268)

• Virtualized XSAVE support has been added to bhyve, permitting guests to use XSAVE and XSAVE-enabled features like AVX. (r261638)

• Support for injecting hardware exceptions for emulated instructions have been added to bhyve. (r262144)

Xen Improvements

• Xen supports event channel PIRQ allowing for Dom0 to manage physical hardware (r269507)

• Support for unmapped IO has been added to blkfront (r269814)

Hyper-V Improvements

• HyperV Key-Value Pair driver and daemon has been added (r271493)

Other Improvements

• Tx/Rx multiqueue support has been added to the VMware VMXNET3 Virtual Interface Controller device (r263259)

• Support for adding carp interfaces into a jail (r269522)

• Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) support has been added to mkimg(1) (r268236)

Wireless Improvements

• Support has been added for the Intel Centrino Wireless-N 105 chipset (r266770)

• Support for net80211 provided (legacy) sleep management (r264855)

• Support for power save management and beacon programming have been added into the ath(4) driver (r265115)

Storage Subsystem Improvements

• Unmapped IO support has been added to both the VirtIO Block and SCSI driver (r260582 and r260583)

• Support for MegaRAID Fury cards have been added into mfi(4) (r261535)

• Support for LSI MPT3 12Gb SAS controllers (r265236)

• Sysctls for dirty data tuning have been added for ZFS (r266497)

• Support for disklabel64 (r267360)

• Support for multi-threading of soft updates. (r269533)

Security

• Sandboxing in OpenSSH is enabled by default (r261340)

• Capsicum and Casper protects ping(8) against malicious network packets (r261498)

• The default hash function has been changed to SHA512 (r261913)

• The kernel implementation of sha256 has been replaced with a newer implementation that testing has shown to be about 20% faster (r263218)

Desktop-related changes

• The trackpads found in Apple MacBook products are now supported (r261260)

• The AMD Radeon DRM/KMS driver supports running 32 bit applications on a 64 bit host (r265262)

Other changes

• NFS performance has been greatly improved, MFC-ed (r261054, r261055)

• Support for displaying Vital Product Data has been added to pciconf(8) (r260926)

• Support for GPS ports have been added to the uhso(4) driver. (r260903)

• OpenSSL has been upgraded to version 1.0.1i (r269682)

• jemalloc has been upgraded to version 3.6.0. (r263974)

• sendmail has been upgraded to version 8.14.8 (r261194)

• Support for Intel's Supervisor Mode Access Prevention (SMAP) instructions has been added to binutils (r261175)

• gcc now supports -Wmissing-prototypes in C++ (r261178)

• bmake has been upgraded to version 20140620 (r268437)

• libc++ has been upgraded to version 3.4 (r261283)

• OpenSSH has been upgraded to version 6.6p1 (r263712)

• groff incorporates vendor changes up to 2014-01-29 (r261319)

• mdocml has been upgraded to version 1.12.3 (r261344)

• LLVM and Clang have been upgraded to version 3.4.1 (r265925)

• atf has been upgraded to version 0.20 (r261897)

• talk(1) is capable of displaying UTF-8 characters (r263264)

• epoll support has been added to the Linux compatibility layer (r255672)

• lindev(4) has been removed since /dev/full is now a standard feature of FreeBSD (r265212)

• apr has been upgraded to version 1.5.1 (r266735)

• Subversion has been upgraded to version 1.8.8 (r262250)

• serf has been upgraded to version 1.3.5 (r266728)

• libucl has been upgraded to version 20140718 (r268876)

• Sendmail has been upgraded to version 8.14.9 (r266528)

• ldns has been upgraded to version 1.6.17 (r266114)

• unbound has been upgraded to version 1.4.22 (r266114)

• tzdata has been upgraded to version 2014e (r267452)

• byacc has been upgraded to version 20141006 (r272769)

• csup has been removed from base (r267863)

• DTrace version bumped to 1.12.1 (r267942)

• libc now has re-entrant versions of the hash functions (r268943)

• sqlite has been upgraded to version 3.8.5 (r269851)

• xz has been upgraded to version 5.2.0 which brings support for multi-threaded compression (r278433)

• ncurses has been upgraded to version 5.9 20140222 (r262685)

• ACPICA has been upgraded to version 20140926 (r272444)

• Baud rate support has been added to telnet (r274364)

• libxo version 0.1.6 has been imported into base (r274672)

Quarterly status reports

• October-December 2013 Quarterly status report

• January-March 2014 Quarterly status report

Other documentation

It is useful to keep an eye on wiki changes (https://wiki.freebsd.org/RecentChanges) and the commits mailing list (http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/svn-src-head).