The highlights in the 7.3-RELEASE are the following:
The ZFS file system has been updated to version 13. The changes include ZFS operations by a regular user, L2ARC, ZFS Intent Log on separated disks (slog), sparse volumes, and so on.
A lock handling error has been fixed in interaction between malloc(3) implementation and threading library.
A deadlock in the sched_ule(4) scheduler has been fixed.
A new sysctl variable security.bsd.map_at_zero has been added
and set to 1 (allow) by default. This
controls whether FreeBSD allows to map an object at the
address 0, which is part of the
user-controlled portion of the virtual address
space. Disabling this has some effect on preventing an attack
which injects malicious code into that location and triggers a
NULL pointer dereference in the kernel.
A new boot loader gptzfsboot, which supports GPT and ZFS has been added. zfsloader, the final boot loader similar to loader(8) which supports ZFS has been added.
[amd64, i386] CPU cache flushing has been optimized when changing caching attributes of pages by doing nothing for CPUs that support self-snooping and using CLFLUSH instead of a full cache invalidate when possible.
The amdsbwd(4) driver for AMD SB600/SB7xx watchdog timer has been added.
[amd64, i386] The hwpmc(4) driver for Hardware Performance Monitoring Counter support has been added.
DRM now supports Radeon HD 4200 (RS880), 4770 (RV740), and R6/7xx 3D, and Intel G41 chips.
The alc(4) driver for Atheros AR8131/AR8132 PCIe Ethernet controller has been added.
[sparc64] The cas(4) driver has been added to provide support for Sun Cassini/Cassini+ and National Semiconductor DP83065 Saturn Gigabit Ethernet devices.
A userland utility mfiutil(8) for the mfi(4) devices has been added.
A userland utility mptutil(8) for the mpt(4) devices has been added.
The yp(8) utilities now support shadow.byname and shadow.byuid maps. These requires privileged port access.
The service(8) command as an easy interface for the rc.d scripts has been added.
ISC BIND has been updated to version 9.4-ESV.
sendmail has been updated from version 8.14.3 to version 8.14.4.
The supported version of the GNOME desktop environment (x11/gnome2) has been updated to 2.28.2.
The supported version of the KDE desktop environment (x11/kde4) has been updated to 4.3.5.
FreeBSD release ISO images now have “FreeBSD-” at the beginning of the filenames.
For more details, please see the Detailed Release Notes.
A list of all platforms currently under development can be found on the Supported Platforms page.