FreeBSD The Power to Serve

FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE Errata

The FreeBSD Project

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This document lists errata items for FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE, containing significant information discovered after the release or too late in the release cycle to be otherwise included in the release documentation. This information includes security advisories, as well as news relating to the software or documentation that could affect its operation or usability. An up-to-date version of this document should always be consulted before installing this version of FreeBSD.

This errata document for FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE will be maintained until the release of FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE.


1 Introduction

This errata document contains ``late-breaking news'' about FreeBSD 4.10-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version of this errata document actually distributed with the release (for example, on a CDROM distribution) will be out of date by definition, but other copies are kept updated on the Internet and should be consulted as the ``current errata'' for this release.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 4-STABLE 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/.


2 Security Advisories

No active security advisories.


3 Late-Breaking News

(20 May 2004) A security problem was discovered in CVS but the release notes did not state that since it was very late in the release cycle. FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE includes a fix for it and is not vulnerable. For the details, see the security advisory FreeBSD-SA-04:10.

(23 May 2004) As a side effect of closing a security problem related to msync(2), the MS_INVALIDATE flag no longer guarantees that all pages in the range are invalidated. This can cause problems when pages are backed by a remote file (e.g. via NFS) where other machines can write to the permanent storage since the local pages not being invalidated might then contain stale data. The security problem being addressed is a strictly local exploit, and only allows a local user to block the writing of data to a file under certain circumstances. Users who require the old semantics of MS_INVALIDATE and are not concerned with the security issue being fixed can set the vm.old_msync sysctl to 1 which will revert to the old (insecure) behavior.

(25 May 2004) The twe(4) driver was recently updated by the vendor. Problems have been reported in rare circumstances under conditions that are hard to reproduce. Work is ongoing to isolate these problems and determine their source.

(27 May 2004) The bfe(4) driver for Broadcom BCM4401 based Fast Ethernet adapters has been added but the release notes did not mention that.


This file, and other release-related documents, can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/.

For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.

For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.