FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE Announcement

Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:19:52 -0500

From: Ken Smith <kensmith@FreeBSD.org>

To: freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.org

Subject: [FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE Available

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the 7-STABLE branch which introduces many new features along with many improvements to functionality present in the earlier branches. Some of the highlights:

Dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability shown by various database and other benchmarks, in some cases showing peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better. Results are from benchmarks used to analyze and improve system performance, results with your specific work load may vary. Some of the changes that contribute to this improvement are: The 1:1 libthr threading model is now the default. Finer-grained IPC, networking, and scheduler locking. A major focus on optimizing the SMP architecture that was put in place during the 5.x and 6.x branches. Some benchmarks show linear scaling up to 8 CPUs. Many workloads see a significant performance improvement with multicore systems.

The ULE scheduler is vastly improved, providing improved performance and interactive response (the 4BSD scheduler is still the default for 7.0 but ULE may become the default for 7.1).

Experimental support for Sun's ZFS filesystem.

gjournal can be used to set up journaled filesystems, gvirstor can be used as a virtualized storage provider.

Read-only support for the XFS filesystem.

The unionfs filesystem has been fixed.

iSCSI initiator.

TSO and LRO support for some network drivers.

Experimental SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) support (FreeBSD's being the reference implementation).

Much improved wireless (802.11) support.

Network link aggregation/trunking (lagg(4)) imported from OpenBSD.

JIT compilation to turn BPF into native code, improving packet capture performance.

Much improved support for embedded system development for boards based on the ARM architecture.

jemalloc, a new and highly scalable user-level memory allocator.

freebsd-update(8) provides officially supported binary upgrades to new releases in addition to security fixes and errata patches.

X.Org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, GNOME 2.20.2.

GNU C compiler 4.2.1.

BIND 9.4.2.

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

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.0R/relnotes.html

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.0R/errata.html

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

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/

Availability

FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, and powerpc architectures. The version for the sparc64 architecture will become available in a few days. Some of the package builds are still in progress.

FreeBSD 7.0 can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network; the required files can be downloaded via FTP or BitTorrent as described in the sections below. While some of the smaller FTP mirrors may not carry all architectures, they will all generally contain the more common ones, such as i386 and amd64.

MD5 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISO images are included at the bottom of this message.

The contents of the ISO images provided as part of the release has changed for most of the architectures. Using the i386 architecture as an example, there are ISO images named ``bootonly'', ``disc1'', ``disc2'', ``disc3'', ``livefs'', and ``docs''. The ``bootonly'' image is suitable for booting a machine to do a network based installation using FTP or NFS. The ``disc1'', ``disc2'', and ``disc3'' images are used to do a full installation that includes a basic set of packages and does not require network access to an FTP or NFS server during the installation. To boot into a ``live CD-based filesystem'' and system rescue mode ``disc1'' and ``livefs'' are needed. The ``docs'' image has all of the documentation for all supported languages. Most people will find that ``disc1'', ``disc2'' and ``disc3'' are all that are needed if you want to install some packages during the initial install, and just ``disc1'' if you prefer to install packages after the initial install is completed.

FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE can also be purchased on CD-ROM from several vendors. One of the vendors that will be offering FreeBSD 7.0-based products is:

Bittorrent

7.0-RELEASE ISOs are available via BitTorrent. A collection of torrent files to download the images is available at:

http://torrents.freebsd.org:8080/

FTP

The primary mirror site is:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/

However, before trying the central FTP site, please check your regional mirror(s) first by going to:

ftp://ftp.<yourdomain>.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD

Any additional mirror sites will be labeled ftp2, ftp3 and so on.

More information about FreeBSD mirror sites can be found at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html

For instructions on installing FreeBSD, please see Chapter 2 of The FreeBSD Handbook. It provides a complete installation walk-through for users new to FreeBSD, and can be found online at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install.html

Updating Existing Systems

An upgrade of any existing system to FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE constitutes a major version upgrade, so no matter which method you use to update an older system you should reinstall any ports you have installed on the machine. This will avoid binaries becoming linked to inconsistent sets of libraries when future port upgrades rebuild one port but not others that link to it. This can be done with:

# portupgrade -faP

after updating your system. Note some of the tools to help with this or the instructions below for FreeBSD Update are not installed by default (e.g. portupgrade, gpg, or similar tools like portmaster).

Updates from Source

The procedure for doing a source code based update is described in the FreeBSD Handbook:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/synching.html

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html

The branch tag to use for updating the source is RELENG_7_0 .

FreeBSD Update

Starting with FreeBSD 6.3, the freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems systems running earlier FreeBSD releases, release candidates, and betas. Users upgrading to FreeBSD 7.0 from older releases (in particular, older than 7.0-RC1) will need to download an updated version of freebsd-update(8) that supports upgrading to a new release.

# fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~cperciva/freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz

Downloading and verifying the digital signature for the tarball (signed by the FreeBSD Security Officer's PGP key) is highly recommended.

# fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~cperciva/freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz.asc

# gpg --verify freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz.asc freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz

The new freebsd-update(8) can then be extracted and run as follows:

# tar -xf freebsd-update-upgrade.tgz

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf -r 7.0-RELEASE upgrade

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf install

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

# shutdown -r now

Next, freebsd-update.sh needs to be run again to install the new userland components, after which all ports should be recompiled to link to new libraries:

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf install

# portupgrade -faP

Finally, freebsd-update.sh needs to be run one last time to remove old system libraries, after which the system should be rebooted in order that the updated userland and ports will be running:

# sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf install

# shutdown -r now

For more information, see:

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-11-11-freebsd-major-version-upgrade.html

Support

The FreeBSD Security Team currently plans to support FreeBSD 7.0 until February 28th, 2009. For more information on the Security Team and their support of the various FreeBSD branches see:

http://www.freebsd.org/security/

Acknowledgments

Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to support the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 7.0 including The FreeBSD Foundation, FreeBSD Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo!, Network Appliances, and Sentex Communications.

The release engineering team for 7.0-RELEASE includes:

Ken Smith <kensmith@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering, amd64, i386 sparc64 Release Building, Mirror Site Coordination Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering, Security Maxime Henrion <mux@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering Bruce A. Mah <bmah@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering, Documentation George Neville-Neil <gnn@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering Hiroki Sato <hrs@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering, Documentation Murray Stokely <murray@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering Marcel Moolenaar <marcel@FreeBSD.org> ia64, powerpc Release Building Takahashi Yoshihiro <nyan@FreeBSD.org> PC98 Release Building Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org> Package Building Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus@FreeBSD.org> Package Building Erwin Lansing <erwin@FreeBSD.org> Package Building Mark Linimon <linimon@FreeBSD.org> Package Building Pav Lucistnik <pav@FreeBSD.org> Package Building Colin Percival <cperciva@FreeBSD.org> Security Officer Simon Nielsen <simon@FreeBSD.org> Deputy Security Officer Peter Wemm <peter@FreeBSD.org> Bittorrent Coordination

Trademark

FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.

ISO Image Checksums

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