June 14, 2014

FreeBSD 9.3-BETA3 Now Available

The third BETA 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 GNATS PR system or on the -stable mailing list.

Please note, as the FreeBSD bug tracking system is undergoing maintenance, the PR system may be unavailable. Problem reports submitted this maintenance period are being queued for later processing.

If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system, use the “stable/9” branch.

A list of changes since 9.2-RELEASE are available on the stable/9 release notes page here: http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/9-STABLE/relnotes/article.html

Changes between 9.3-BETA2 and 9.3-BETA3 include:

  • A new ttys(5) flag, onifconsole, has been added, which activates ttyu0 if the device is an active kernel console.
  • The NFSv4 server now allows creating a hard link to a symbolic link, as was allowed in NFSv3.
  • OpenSSL has been updated to 0.9.8za.
  • A deadlock caused by incorrect reference counts has been fixed in the usb(4) driver.
  • The arc4random(3) library has been updated to match that in FreeBSD-CURRENT.
  • The amount of data collected by hwpmc(4) has been increased to work with modern processors and available RAM.
  • A new pmcstat(8) flag, ‘-l’, has been added, which ends event collection after the specified number of seconds.

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-BETA3

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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