OpenBSD 4.2 released

The OpenBSD team is pleased to announce the release of OpenBSD 4.2. See the announcement for more information. This release is dedicated to the memory of long-time developer Jun-ichiro "itojun" Itoh Hagino, who focused his life on IPv6 deployment for everyone. Place an order worldwide or order in Europe, or if you only download from FTP then make a donation. If you do FTP your release, be sure to use a local mirror and not the main ftp server: o ftp.kd85.com   Austria       o ftp.stacken.kth.se   Sweden o ftp2.usa.openbsd.org   NYC, USA       o ftp3.usa.openbsd.org   CO, USA o ftp5.usa.openbsd.org   CA, USA       o rt.fm   IL, USA For greater convenience, the new 4.2 release also comes with roughly ~200MB full install ISO images called "install42.iso". If you download this file, you do not need the other standard install files. Highlights of OpenBSD 4.2 are listed below.

• New/extended platforms:
  • OpenBSD/sparc64.
    The PCIe UltraSPARC IIIi machines like the V215 and V245 are now supported.
  • OpenBSD/hppa.
    Four-digit B/C/J-class workstations like the B2000, C3750 or J6750 are now supported (in 32-bit mode).
  • OpenBSD/alpha.
    Add support in the alpha platform for a couple of new Alpha models, AlphaServer 1200 and 4100.
  
  
• Platforms skipped this release:
  • OpenBSD/sgi.
    This architecture will not be released this time.
  
  
• Install/Upgrade process changes:
  • New install method!!
    For the most popular architectures, the FTP sites have a ~200MB install ISO file, which contains the base set, permitting non-network installs.
  • Allow the specification of an NTP server during installation.
  • Allow no fsck'ing of clean non-root partitions during upgrade.
  • Check for INSTALL. to confirm sets are for the correct architecture.
  • Create and format the MSDOS partition for macppc installs in a more flexible and reliable way.
  
  
• Improved hardware support, including:
  • Native Serial-ATA support:
    • ahci(4) driver for SATA controllers conforming to the Advanced Host Controller Interface specification.
    • jmb(4) driver for the JMicron JMB36x SATA II and PATA Host Controller.
    • sili(4) driver for SATA controllers using the Silicon Image 3124/3132/3531 SATALink chipsets.
  • The pciide(4) driver has had support added for newer chipsets, including:
    • Intel ICH8M PATA
    • JMicron JMB36x PATA
    • VIA CX700/VX700 PATA
  • The lm(4) driver now supports Winbond W83627DHG and W83627E HF-A Super I/O Hardware Monitors.
  • The siop(4) driver now has support for NCR 53C720/770 controllers in big endian mode. In particular this means that the onboard Fast-Wide SCSI on many hppa machines is supported now.
  • New tht(4) driver for Tehuti Networks 10Gb Ethernet controllers.
  • The malo(4) driver now supports Marvell 88W8385 802.11g based Compact Flash devices.
  • New uts(4) driver for USB touch screens, supported by the xtsscale(1) calibration utility.
  • The i810(4) X.Org driver and the PCI AGP driver now support Intel i965GM chips.
  • New led(4) driver for the front panel LEDs on the V215/245.
  • New bbc(4) driver providing support for the BootBus Controllers in UltraSparc III systems.
  • New pmc(4) driver for the watchdog(4) timer on the National Semiconductor PC87317 SuperIO chip.
  • New pyro(4) driver for the SPARC64 Host/PCIe bridge.
  • New astro(4) driver for the Astro Memory and I/O controller on hppa.
  • New elroy(4) driver for the Elroy PCI hostbridge on hppa.
  • New lcd(4) driver for the front panel LCD display on hppa.
  • New ssio(4) driver for the National Semiconductor PC87560 Legacy IO on hppa.
  • New pxammc(4) driver for the MMC/SD/SDIO controller on zaurus.
  • New xlights(4) driver for the front panel lights on the Xserve G4.
  • New sysbutton(4) driver for the system identification button on the Xserve G4.
  • New piixpcib(4) driver for System Management Mode initiated speedstep frequency scaling on certain pairings of the Intel PIIX4 ISA bridges and Intel Pentium 3 processors.
  • CPU frequency and voltage can now be scaled on all CPUs when running GENERIC.MP on a multiprocessor i386 or AMD64 machine with enhanced speedstep or powernow.
  • Intel enhanced speedstep is now supported on OpenBSD/amd64.
  • New support for the on die CPU temperature sensor found on the Intel Core family of processors.
  • The nvram(4) driver is now available on OpenBSD/amd64.
  
  
• New tools:
  • cwm(1) has replaced wm2 as a simple-looking low-resource window manager.
  • zless(1), view compressed files with less(1).
  • mount_vnd(8), a utility to configure vnode disks from fstab(5).
  
  
• New functionality:
  • FFS2, the updated version of the fast file system.
  • ftp(1) now can send cookies loaded from a netscape-like cookiejar, supports proxies requiring a password, and has a keep-alive option to avoid over-aggressive control connection dropping.
  • pkg_add(1) has been vastly improved. It is more robust, outputs more consistent error messages, and can deal with a lot more update scenarios gracefully. It also has much better look-up capabilities for multiple entries in PKG_PATH, stopping at the first directory with suitable candidates.
  • ftp-proxy(8) is now able to automatically tag packets passing through the pf(4) rule with a supplied name.
  • Kernel work queues, workq_add_task(9), workq_create(9), workq_destroy(9) provides a mechanism to defer tasks to a process context when it is impossible to run such a task in the current context.
  • ifconfig(8) now understands IP address/mask in CIDR notation.
  • Add IP (v4 and v6) load balancing to carp(4), similar to the ARP balancing.
  • sensorsd(8) now supports a zero-configuration monitoring and has a more intuitive logging for all sensors that automatically provide sensor state. It also features advancements in user-specified monitoring, including monitoring of sensors that are periodically flagged as invalid.
  • sensorsd.conf(5) now supports sensor matching by sensor type, allowing easier configuration.
  • The i386 bootloader can now load amd64 kernels.
  • The amd64 bootloader can now load i386 kernels.
  
  
• Assorted improvements and code cleanup:
  • Large (>1TB) disk and partition support in the disklabel and buffer cache code and in the userland utilities that manipulate disk blocks. Note that some parts of the system are not 64-bit disk block clean yet, so partitions larger than 2TB cannot be used at the moment.
  • Large (>2^32-1 sectors) SCSI disk sizes now probed.
  • Thread support for the Objective-C library (libobjc).
  • carp route handling has been fixed, solving some problems the routing daemons were exhibiting.
  • Various improvements in pf increase performance drastically, stateful passing more than twice as fast than before.
  • A change in how the kernel random pool is stirred increases performance with network interface cards that support interrupt mitigation a lot.
  • i386 TLB handling improved to avoid possible corruption on Core2Duo processors.
  • Rework TLB shootdown code for i386 and amd64, gives fairly large speed improvements.
  • i386 and amd64 use the BIOS disk geometry when creating default disklabels.
  • Default disk geometry changed from 64 heads/32 sectors to 255 heads/63 sectors.
  • More USB devices with various quirks coerced to work.
  • Archive/Wangtek cartridge tape drives (wt*) no longer supported.
  • rcs has improved GNU compatibility.
  • make(1) has improved stability of -j option.
  
  
• OpenSSH 4.7:
  • Prevent ssh(1) from using a trusted X11 cookie if creation of an untrusted cookie fails.
  • sshd(8) in new installations defaults to SSH Protocol 2 only. Existing installations are unchanged.
  • The SSH channel window size has been increased, and both ssh(1) sshd(8) now send window updates more aggressively. These improves performance on high-BDP (Bandwidth Delay Product) networks.
  • ssh(1) and sshd(8) now preserve MAC contexts between packets, which saves 2 hash calls per packet and results in 12-16% speedup for arcfour256/hmac-md5.
  • A new MAC algorithm has been added, UMAC-64 (RFC4418) as "umac-64@openssh.com". UMAC-64 has been measured to be approximately 20% faster than HMAC-MD5.
  • A -K flag was added to ssh(1) to set GSSAPIAuthentication=Yes
  • Failure to establish a ssh(1) TunnelForward is now treated as a fatal error when the ExitOnForwardFailure option is set.
  • ssh(1) returns a sensible exit status if the control master goes away without passing the full exit status.
  
  
• OpenBGPD 4.2:
  • Include support for Four-octet AS Number Space.
  • Allow matching on communities using 0 in the AS part.
  • Filtering on IPv6 prefixes is now possible.
  • Various bugs in the encoding of multiprotocol updates were fixed.
  • Allow the use of pkill -HUP bgpd to reload the config.
  • bgpctl can filter prefix output by community now.
  
  
• OpenOSPFD 4.2:
  • Added support for RFC 3137: OSPF Stub Router Advertisement.
  • It is possible to specify a carp demote group on interfaces and areas.
  • Added support for mapping route labels to AS-external route tags and vice versa.
  • Allow the use of pkill -HUP ospfd to reload the config.
  
  
• HostStated 4.2:
  • Added support for Layer 7 load balancing (or relay).
  • Added support for reloading through hoststatectl or SIGHUP.
  • Added support for testing name-based virtual hosts.
  
  
• Over 4,500 ports, minor robustness improvements in package tools.
  • Many pre-built packages for each architecture:
    

    i386:	4360	sparc64:	4205	alpha:	3779	sh:	817
    amd64:	4283	powerpc:	4230	sparc:	3283	m68k:	1107
    arm:	2131	hppa:	3215

  • Highlights include:
    • Gnome 2.18.
    • GNUstep 1.14.
    • KDE 3.5.7 and koffice 1.6.3.
    • Xfce 4.4.1.
    • OpenMotif 2.3.0.
    • OpenOffice.org 2.2.1.
    • Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6.
    • PostgreSQL 8.2.4.
    • GHC 6.6.1 (amd64 and i386 only)
  
  
• As usual, steady improvements in manual pages and other documentation.
  
• The system includes the following major components from outside suppliers:
  • Xenocara (based on X.Org 7.2 + patches, freetype 2.2.1, fontconfig 2.4.2, expat 2.0.0, Mesa 6.5.2, xterm 225 and more)
  • Gcc 2.95.3 (+ patches) and 3.3.5 (+ patches)
  • Perl 5.8.8 (+ patches)
  • Our improved and secured version of Apache 1.3, with SSL/TLS and DSO support
  • OpenSSL 0.9.7j (+ patches)
  • Groff 1.15
  • Sendmail 8.14.1, with libmilter
  • Bind 9.3.4 (+ patches)
  • Lynx 2.8.5rel.4 with HTTPS and IPv6 support (+ patches)
  • Sudo 1.6.9p4
  • Ncurses 5.2
  • Latest KAME IPv6
  • Heimdal 0.7.2 (+ patches)
  • Arla 0.35.7
  • Binutils 2.15 (+ patches)
  • Gdb 6.3 (+ patches)

If you'd like to see a list of what has changed between OpenBSD 4.1 and 4.2, look at http://www.OpenBSD.org/plus42.html.

Thank you to all of the developers who make OpenBSD possible. Please be sure to make a donation to continue to make OpenBSD releases possible.