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1 Introduction

This errata document contains ``late-breaking news'' about FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE. Before installing this version, it is important to consult this document to learn about any post-release discoveries or problems that may already have been found and fixed.

Any version of this errata document actually distributed with the release (for example, on a CDROM distribution) will be out of date by definition, but other copies are kept updated on the Internet and should be consulted as the ``current errata'' for this release. These other copies of the errata are located at http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/, plus any sites which keep up-to-date mirrors of this location.

Source and binary snapshots of FreeBSD 5-CURRENT also contain up-to-date copies of this document (as of the time of the snapshot).

For a list of all FreeBSD CERT security advisories, see http://www.FreeBSD.org/security/ or ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/.

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2 Security Advisories

No active security advisories.

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3 Late-Breaking News

The geom(4)-based disk partitioning code in the kernel will not allow an open partition to be overwritten. This usually prevents the use of disklabel -B to update the boot blocks on a disk because the a partition overlaps the space where the boot blocks are stored. A suggested workaround is to boot from an alternate disk, a CDROM, or a fixit floppy.

When using disk media with sector sizes larger than 512 bytes (for instance, gbde(4) encrypted disks), the dump(8) program fails to respect the larger sector size and cannot dump the partition. One possible workaround is to copy the entire file system in raw format and dump the copy. It is, for instance, possible to dump a file system stored in a regular file:

    # dd if=/dev/ad0s1d.bde of=/junk/ad0.dd bs=1m
    # dump 0f - /junk/ad0.dd | ...

A simpler workaround is to use tar(1) or cpio(1) to make backup copies.

Hangs have been reported during FreeBSD 5.0 snapshot installations when installing to mly(4)-supported RAID arrays, in hardware configurations that appear to work fine under FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE.

NETNCP and nwfs appear to be as-yet unadapted for KSE, and hence not working.

During installation, the iir(4) controller appears to probe correctly, but finds no disk devices.

truss(1) appears to contain a race condition during the start-up of debugging, which can result in truss(1) failing to attach to the process before it exists. The symptom is that truss(1) reports that it cannot open the procfs(5) node supporting the process being debugged. A bug also appears to exist wherein truss(1) will hang if execve(2) returns ENOENT A further race appears to exist in which truss(1) will return ``PIOCWAIT: Input/output error'' occasionally on startup. The fix for this sufficiently changes process execution handling that it has been deferred until after 5.0.

Some bugs have been reported in sysinstall(8) disk partitioning. One observed problem on the i386 is that sysinstall(8) cannot recalculate the free space left on a disk after changing the type of an FDISK-type partition.

In some case, documentation (such as the FAQ or Handbook) has not been updated to take into account FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE features. Examples of areas where documentation is still needed include gbde(8) and the new ``fast IPsec'' implementation.