July 15, 2014

FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE Announcement

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/9 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE and introduces some new features.

Some of the highlights:

  • The zfs(8) filesystem has been updated to support the bookmarks feature.
  • The uname(1) utility has been updated to include the -U and -K flags, which print the __FreeBSD_version for the running userland and kernel, respectively.
  • The fetch(3) library has been updated to support SNI (Server Name Identification), allowing to use virtual hosts on HTTPS.
  • Several updates to gcc(1) have been imported from Google.
  • The hastctl(8) utility has been updated to output the current queue sizes.
  • The protect(1) command has been added, which allows exempting processes from being killed when swap is exhausted.
  • The etcupdate(8) utility, a tool for managing updates to files in /etc, has been merged from head/.
  • A new shared library directory, /usr/lib/private, has been added for internal-use shared libraries.
  • OpenPAM has been updated to Nummularia (20130907).
  • A new flag, “onifconsole” has been added to /etc/ttys. This allows the system to provide a login prompt via serial console if the device is an active kernel console, otherwise it is equivalent to off.
  • Sendmail has been updated to version 8.14.9.
  • BIND has been updated to version 9.9.5.
  • The xz(1) utility has been updated to a post-5.0.5 snapshot.
  • OpenSSH has been updated to version 6.6p1.
  • OpenSSL has been updated to version 0.9.8za.

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see:

Availability

FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures.

FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network. Some architectures also support installing from a USB memory stick. The required files can be downloaded via FTP as described in the section below. While some of the smaller FTP mirrors may not carry all architectures, they will all generally contain the more common ones such as amd64 and i386.

SHA256 and MD5 hashes for the release ISO and memory stick images are included at the bottom of this message. A PGP-signed version of this announcement is available at:

Please refer to the official announcement email for the full details regarding FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE.

Acknowledgments

Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to support the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 9.3 including The FreeBSD Foundation, Yahoo!, NetApp, Internet Systems Consortium, ByteMark Hosting, Sentex Communications, New York Internet, Juniper Networks, NLNet Labs, iXsystems, and Yandex.

The release engineering team for 9.3-RELEASE includes:

Glen Barber <gjb@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering Lead, 9.3-RELEASE Release Engineer
Konstantin Belousov <kib@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Joel Dahl <joel@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Baptiste Daroussin <bapt@FreeBSD.org> Package Building
Bryan Drewery <bdrewery@FreeBSD.org> Package Building
Marc Fonvieille <blackend@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering, Documentation
Steven Kreuzer <skreuzer@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Xin Li <delphij@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering, Security Officer
Josh Paetzel <jpaetzel@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Colin Percival <cperciva@FreeBSD.org> Security Officer Emeritus
Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Hiroki Sato <hrs@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering, Documentation
Gleb Smirnoff <glebius@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Ken Smith <kensmith@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Dag-Erling Smøgrav <des@FreeBSD.org> Security Officer
Marius Strobl <marius@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering, Security

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