The highlights in the 8.1-RELEASE are the following:
[powerpc] FreeBSD now supports SMP in PowerPC G5 systems. Note that SMP support on FreeBSD/powerpc is disabled by default in GENERIC kernel.
[sparc64] FreeBSD now supports UltraSPARC IV, IV+, and SPARC64 V CPUs.
The ZFS zpool version has been updated to 14. The zfsloader has been added. This is a separate zfs(8) enabled loader. Note that a ZFS bootcode (zfsboot or gptzfsboot) need to be installed to use this new loader.
The bwn(4) driver for Broadcom BCM43xx chipsets has been added.
The run(4) driver for Ralink RT2700U/RT2800U/RT3000U USB 802.11agn devices has been added.
The sge(4) driver for Silicon Integrated Systems SiS190/191 Fast/Gigabit Ethernet has been added. This supports TSO and TSO over VLAN.
The uhso(4) driver for Option HSDPA USB devices has been added. A new uhsoctl(1) userland utility can be used to initiate and close the WAN connection.
The urtw(4) driver has been improved and now supports RTL8187B-based devices.
The ipfw(4) subsystem including dummynet(4) has been improved.
The pfil(9) framework for packet filtering in FreeBSD kernel now supports separate packet filtering instances like ipfw(4) for each VIMAGE jail.
The
vlan(4) pseudo
interface now supports TSO (TCP Segmentation Offloading). The capability flag is named as
IFCAP_VLAN_HWTSO and it is separated from IFCAP_VLAN_HWTAGGING. The
age(4),
alc(4),
ale(4),
bce(4),
bge(4),
cxgb(4),
jme(4), re(4), and
mxge(4) driver
support this feature.
The vlan(4) pseudo interface for IEEE 802.1Q VLAN now ignore renaming of the parent's interface name. The configured VLAN interfaces continue to work with the new name while previously the configurations were removed as the renaming happens.
The HAST (Highly Available STorage) framework has been added. This is a framework to allow transparently storing data on two physically separated machines connected over the TCP/IP network. HAST works in Primary-Secondary (Master-Backup, Master-Slave) configuration, which means that only one of the cluster nodes can be active at any given time. Only Primary node is able to handle I/O requests to HAST-managed devices. Currently HAST is limited to two cluster nodes in total.
FreeBSD
cam(3) SCSI
framework has been improved and a new kernel option option ATA_CAM has been added. This
turns
ata(4) controller
drivers into
cam(4) interface
modules. When enabled, this option deprecates all
ata(4) peripheral
drivers and interfaces such as ad
and acd, and allows
cam(4) drivers ada, and cd
and interfaces to be natively used instead. Note that this
is not enabled by default in the GENERIC kernel.
The mvs(4) CAM ATA driver for Marvell 88SX50XX/88SX60XX/88SX70XX/SoC SATA controllers has been added. This driver supports same hardware as the ata(4) driver does, but provides many additional features, such as NCQ and PMP.
The liblzma library for LZMA2 lossless data compression algorithm and the userland utilities xz(1), xzdec(1), lzma(1), and lzmainfo(1). has been imported.
The ACPI-CA has been updated to 20100304.
ISC BIND has been updated to version 9.6.2-P2.
OpenSSH has been updated from version 5.1p1 to version 5.4p1.
OpenSSL has been updated to version 0.9.8n.
sendmail has been updated 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 4.4.3.
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.