July 6, 2014

FreeBSD 9.3-RC3 Now Available

The third RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

The image checksums can be found in the PGP-signed announcement email.

ISO images and, for architectures that support it, the memory stick images are available here:http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/9.3/ (or any of the FreeBSD mirror sites).

If you notice problems you can report them through the normal Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system, use the “releng/9.3” branch.

A list of changes since 9.2-RELEASE are available on the 9.3-RELEASE release notes page here: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.3R/relnotes.html

Changes between 9.3-RC2 and 9.3-RC3 include:

  • Bug fix for axge(4) range checks and receive loop header parsing.
  • Bug fix to exclude loopback addresses rather than loopback interfaces has been fixed.
  • Bug fix in uhso(4) to prevent memory use after free() and mtx_destroy().
  • Bug fix in bsdinstall(8) where certain conditions could prevent directory creation before use.
  • Bug fix for DNS-based load balancing.
  • Vendor update to oce(4).

The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64 and i386 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running earlier FreeBSD releases can upgrade as follows:

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.3-RC3

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install

It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 8.x. Alternatively, the misc/compat8x port can be installed to provide other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

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