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January 8, 2009
Today, Linux FreeBSD version 7.1 has been released. The new version 7.1 comes with a number of significant
changes, such as support for OpenSolaris' D-Trace, as well as a new, more efficient application scheduler.
FreeBSD v. 7.1 can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network. The required files can be
downloaded via FTP or BitTorrent. While some of the smaller FTP mirrors may not carry all architectures, they
will all generally contain the more common ones, such as Intel's i386 and AMD's 64.
It should be noted that if you are updating from a 7.0 or earlier Free BSD system due to a change in your
vendor's drivers, certain Intel NICs will now come up as IGB instead of EM. BSD normally tries to avoid
changes like that in stable releases, but they felt it necessary in order to support the new adapters.
There are only 3 PCI ID's that should have their name changed from EM to IGB: 0x10A78086, 0x10A98086 and
0x10D68086.
You should still be able to determine if your PCI card will change names by running the command "pciconf -l"
and for the line representing your NIC (should be named em on older systems, e.g. em0 or em1, etc) check the
fourth column.
If that says "chip=0x10a78086" or one of the other two IDs given above, you will then have the adapter's name
change set correctly.
BSD's new release announcement sums up the most important changes between the older FreeBSD 7.0 and today's
newer 7.1 as follows:
The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for AMD 64 and Intel's i386 architectures. The
ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads.
Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from Open Solaris. DTrace is a comprehensive
dynamic tracing framework.
A new and improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client is now featured.
Boot loader changes allow booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.
The CPU set system call and command have been added, providing an API for threading CPU bindings and
CPU resource grouping.
KDE has now been updated to 3.5.10 and GNOME is updated to 2.22.3.
DVD-sized media for the AMD 64 and i386 architectures now can co-exist.
The new 7.1 version is available for AMD 64, Intel's i386, iA-64, PC-98, Power PC and Sparc 64.
Users of Intel network interfaces which are changing their name from "EM" to "IGB" should make necessary
changes to configuration files before running Free BSD update, since otherwise the NIC will not be
configured appropriately after rebooting the server for the first time.
Users of earlier FreeBSD releases (FreeBSD 6.x and prior) can also use FreeBSD update to upgrade to
FreeBSD v. 7.1. However, they will be prompted to rebuild all third-party applications (e.g., anything installed
from the ports tree) after the second invocation of "freebsd-update install" in order to handle differences
in the system libraries between FreeBSD 6.x and FreeBSD 7.x.
Source: Free BSD.
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