FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE Errata

1 Introduction

This errata document contains “late-breaking news” about FreeBSD 7.2-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version of this errata document actually distributed with the release (for example, on a CDROM distribution) will be out of date by definition, but other copies are kept updated on the Internet and should be consulted as the “current errata” for this release.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 7-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 advisories.

3 Open Issues

[20090501] Some machines do not recognize the i386 disc1 as bootable and fall through to booting off the next boot device. All affected machines did see the other discs as bootable. As a workaround, you can boot using the bootonly or livefs CDROM and then swap in disc1 once sysinstall(8) starts.

[20090504] A lock handling error has been found in interaction between malloc(3) implementation and threading library. When a multi-threaded process calls the fork(2) system call in a thread and the malloc(3) function in another thread, it can cause a deadlock in the child process. An Errata Notice to fix this problem is planned after the release.

[20090505] A bug was found in the bce(4) driver. This prevents it from working with the lagg(4) driver in the LACP (IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation Control Protocol) mode. An Errata Notice to fix this problem is planned after the release.

[20090507] A bug was found in the fxp(4) driver. This would cause poor TCP performance when TSO is enabled, and the receiver has a smaller MSS than the interface MTU setting. To workaround this issue, one can disable TSO by using ifconfig(8) -tso parameter (per interface basis) or setting net.inet.tcp.tso to 0 (globally on the system). An Errata Notice to fix this problem is planned after the release.

[20090608] An issue was found in the bge(4) driver that it can cause a system panic upon reboot with heavy network traffic. A fix has been committed to RELENG_7 (r192127).

4 Late-Breaking News and Corrections

[20090504] A patch to solve the locking issue in the malloc(3) implementation and threading library has been committed to the RELENG_7 branch for public testing.

[20090507] A patch to solve the bug in the fxp(4) driver that caused poor TCP performance has been committed to the RELENG_7 branch for public testing.