FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE Now Available
4 April, 2016 by marius@FreeBSD.org (Marius Strobl) | freebsd
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE Announcement The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE. This is the third release of the stable/10 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: * The UEFI boot loader received several improvements: It now follows /boot/config and /boot.config files, multi-device boot support works and command line arguments are parsed. Additionally, its framebuffer driver has been enhanced with GOP (Graphics Output Protocol) and UGA (Universal Graphics Adapter) handling, allowing to set the current graphics mode on systems using one of these methods. Moreover, ZFS boot capability has been added to the UEFI boot loader, including support for multiple ZFS Boot Environments (BEs), e. g. those provided by sysutils/beadm. * The CAM Target Layer ctl(4) now supports High Availability setups. * The Linux(R) compatibility layer has been substantially improved and now is capable of running 64-bit applications on amd64 (x86_64), 1:1 threading, VDSO and subset of the epoll(7) family sufficient for the majority of programs. * The em(4) and igb(4) drivers have been updated to version 7.6.1 and 2.5.3 respectively. Among others, this brings support for i219/i219(2)/i219(3) hardware found with Intel(R) Skylake generation and newer chipsets. * The isp(4) driver has been updated and improved: It now also supports 16 Gbps Fibre Channel adapters, has improved target mode support and completed Multi-ID (NPIV) functionality. * The ixgbe(4) driver has been updated to Intel(R) FreeBSD Networking Group version 3.1.13-k and support for X552 and X550T was added. * The initial implementation of reroot support has has been added to the reboot(8) utility, allowing the root file system to be mounted from a temporary source file system without requiring a full system reboot. * The bsdinstall(8) utility has been updated to allow for creating root-on-ZFS installations on UEFI-based systems in automatic mode. * The ifconfig(8) utility now reports SFP/SFP+ optics module data when the -v flag is specified and a NIC driver provides such information, i. e. for cxgbe(4), ixgbe(4), mlx5en(4) and sfxge(4). * The jail(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -l, which ensures a clean environment in the target jail. Additionally, jail(8) now runs a shell within the target jail when no command was given. * The mkimg(1) utility has been updated to support NTFS file systems in both GPT and MBR partitioning schemes. * The xz(1) utility has been updated to version 5.2.2, which provides support for multi-threaded compression. * GNOME has been updated to version 3.16.2. * TeXLive has been updated to TL2015. * Xorg-Server has been updated to version 1.17.4. * And much more ... For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at: * https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/10.3R/relnotes.html * https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/10.3R/errata.html For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see: * https://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/ Availability FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, sparc64, and armv6 architectures. FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network. Some architectures also support installing from a USB memory stick. The required files can be downloaded via FTP as described in the section below. While some of the smaller FTP mirrors may not carry all architectures, they will all generally contain the more common ones such as amd64 and i386. SHA256 and MD5 hashes for the release ISO, memory stick, and SD card images are included at the bottom of this message. PGP-signed checksums for the release images are also available at: * https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/10.3R/signatures.html A PGP-signed version of this announcement is available at: * https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/10.3R/announce.asc Additional UEFI-capable images are available for the amd64 (x86_64) architecture. The purpose of the images provided as part of the release are as follows: dvd1 This contains everything necessary to install the base FreeBSD operating system, the documentation, and a small set of pre-built packages aimed at getting a graphical workstation up and running. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. This should be all you need if you can burn and use DVD-sized media. disc1 This contains the base FreeBSD operating system. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages. bootonly This supports booting a machine using the CDROM drive but does not contain the installation distribution sets for installing FreeBSD from the CD itself. You would need to perform a network based install (e.g., from an FTP server) after booting from the CD. memstick This can be written to an USB memory stick (flash drive) and used to do an install on machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages. As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work: # dd if=FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img \ of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct. mini-memstick This can be written to an USB memory stick (flash drive) and used to boot a machine, but does not contain the installation distribution sets on the medium itself, similar to the bootonly image. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages. As one example of how to use the mini-memstick image, assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work: # dd if=FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.img \ of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct. FreeBSD/arm SD card images These can be written to an SD card and used to boot the supported arm system. The SD card image contains the full FreeBSD installation, and can be installed onto SD cards as small as 512Mb. For convenience for those without console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of freebsdis available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to root, which it is strongly recommended to change the password for both users after gaining access to the system. To write the FreeBSD/arm image to an SD card, use the dd(1) utility, replacing KERNEL with the appropriate kernel configuration name for the system. # dd if=FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE-arm-armv6-KERNEL.img \ of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct. FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE can also be purchased on CD-ROM or DVD from several vendors. One of the vendors that will be offering FreeBSD 10.3-based products is: * FreeBSD Mall, Inc. https://www.freebsdmall.com Pre-installed virtual machine images are also available for the amd64 (x86_64) and i386 (x86_32) architectures in QCOW2, VHD, and VMDK disk image formats, as well as raw (unformatted) images. FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE amd64 is also available on these cloud hosting platforms: * Amazon(R) EC2(TM): AMIs are available in the following regions: us-east-1 region: ami-2d6d6347 us-west-1 region: ami-1b275a7b us-west-2 region: ami-dcd239bc sa-east-1 region: ami-e95dd185 eu-west-1 region: ami-a2f87fd1 eu-central-1 region: ami-3427c15b ap-northeast-1 region: ami-840511ea ap-northeast-2 region: ami-02c40d6c ap-southeast-1 region: ami-ddb47ebe ap-southeast-2 region: ami-bf0122dc AMIs are also expected to be available in the Amazon(R) Marketplace at: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00KSS55FY/ * Google(R) Compute Engine(TM): Instances can be deployed using the gcloud utility: % gcloud compute instances create INSTANCE \ --image freebsd-10-3-release-amd64 \ --image-project=freebsd-org-cloud-dev % gcloud compute ssh INSTANCE Replace INSTANCE with the name of the Google Compute Engine instance. * Hashicorp/Atlas(R) Vagrant(TM): Instances can be deployed using the vagrant utility: % vagrant init freebsd/FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE % vagrant up FTP FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE may be downloaded via ftp from the following site: * ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/10.3/ However before trying this site, please check your regional mirror(s) first by going to: * ftp://ftp.<your_country_code>.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: * https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE virtual machine images may be downloaded via ftp