FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE Release Notes

The release notes for FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 11.4-STABLE development line. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.

This document contains the release notes for FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE. It describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of FreeBSD. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of FreeBSD.

All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before installing FreeBSD. The errata document is updated with "late-breaking" information discovered late in the release cycle or after the release. Typically, it contains information on known bugs, security advisories, and corrections to documentation. An up-to-date copy of the errata for FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE can be found on the FreeBSD Web site.

This document describes the most user-visible new or changed features in FreeBSD since 11.3-RELEASE. In general, changes described here are unique to the 11.4-STABLE branch unless specifically marked as MERGED features.

Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 11.3-RELEASE, new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options, major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single change made to FreeBSD between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements.

[amd64,i386] Binary upgrades between RELEASE versions (and snapshots of the various security branches) are supported using the freebsd-update(8) utility. The binary upgrade procedure will update unmodified userland utilities, as well as unmodified GENERIC kernels distributed as a part of an official FreeBSD release. The freebsd-update(8) utility requires that the host being upgraded have Internet connectivity.

Source-based upgrades (those based on recompiling the FreeBSD base system from source code) from previous versions are supported, according to the instructions in /usr/src/UPDATING.

This section lists the various Security Advisories and Errata Notices since 11.3-RELEASE.

This section covers changes and additions to userland applications, contributed software, and system utilities.

The camcontrol(8) utility has been updated to include support for Accessible Max Address Configuration (AMA). r350801(Sponsored by iXsystems)

The camcontrol(8) utility has been updated to support block descriptors with the modepage subcommand. r351582

The yp(8) subsystem has been updated to increase the value of YPMAXRECORD from 1M to 16M for compatibility with Linux®. r351694(Sponsored by Mellanox Technologies)

The usbconfig(8) utility has been updated to include the detach_kernel_driver command. r351843

The jot(1) utility has been updated to allow an endless stream of random data within the specified bounds. r351873

The freebsd-update(8) utility has been updated to include two new commands, updatesready and showconfig. r352758

The cron(8) utility has been updated to support two new flags in crontab(5), -n and -q, which suppress mail on successful runs and suppress logging of command execution, respectively. r353134

The zfs(8) utility has been updated to support renaming bookmarks. r353759

The usbconfig(8) utility has been updated to include the dump_stats command. r356401

The fsck_ffs(8) and newfs(8) utilities has been updated to fix recovery information with sector sizes up to 64k. r356905

The env(1) utility has been updated to include the -L and -U options, which are used to set the environment of the specified user from login.conf and ~/.login_conf, respectively. r357791

The syslogd(8) utility has been updated to add property-based filters. r359740

The bzip2(1) utility has been updated to version 1.0.8. r351007

The WPA utilities have been updated to version 2.9. r351611

The tcsh(1) utility has been updated to version 6.21.0. r354195

The less(1) utility has been updated to version 551. r355504

OpenSSL has been update to version 1.0.2u. r356290

The pcap(3) library has been updated to version 1.9.1. r356341

The mtree(8) utility has been updated to include several bug fixes. r356533

The ntpd(8) utilities have been updated to version 4.2.8p14. r358659

The timezone database files have been updated to version 2020a. r360362

The file(1) utility has been updated to version 5.38. r360521

The xz(1) utility has been updated to version 5.2.5. r360523

The clang, llvm, lld, lldb, libunwind, openmp, compiler-rt utilities and libc++ have been updated to version 10.0.0. r360822

A fix to correctly link DTrace-enabled ports with lld has been added. r361217

This section covers changes and additions to devices and device drivers since 11.3-RELEASE.

The Kerberos GSS API has been updated to emit deprecation warnings for algorithms marked as "SHOULD NOT" be used in RFCs 6649 and 8429. r351243

The crypto(4) driver has been updated to emit deprecation warnings when the ARC4, Blowfish, CAST128, DES, 3DES, MD5-HMAC, and Skipjack algorithms are used. r351246

The ubsec(4) driver has been marked as deprecated, and will be removed in FreeBSD 13.0. r361049

Support for JMicron® JMB582 and JMB585 AHCI controllers has been added. r359971

Support for the D-Link® DWM-222 LTE dongle has been added. r359258

The ng_nat(4) driver has been updated to allow attaching to an ethernet interface. r359698

The ena(4) driver has been updated to version 2.2.0. r361539 (Sponsored by Amazon, Inc.)

This section covers general hardware support for physical machines, hypervisors, and virtualization environments, as well as hardware changes and updates that do not otherwise fit in other sections of this document.

Support for Intel® Cannon Lake PCH has been added to snd_hda(4). r359114

This section covers changes and additions to file systems and other storage subsystems, both local and networked.

Latency of synchronous 128KB writes has been improved. r353583

Support for renaming ZFS bookmarks has been added. r353759

The ZFS ZIL (ZFS intent log) maximum block size is now tunable. r359554

This section describes changes that affect networking in FreeBSD.

The libalias(3) library and ipfw(4) packet filter have been updated to add support for RFC 6598/Carrier Grade NAT subnets. r359695

This section covers changes to the FreeBSD Ports Collection, package infrastructure, and package maintenance and installation tools.

The pkg(8) utility has been updated to version 1.13.2.

The GNOME desktop environment has been updated to version 3.28.

The KDE desktop environment has been updated to version 5.8.4.1.19.12.3.