Variant Symlinks
Andrey V. Elsukov ported the variant symlinks from DragonFlyBSD to FreeBSD. Variant symlinks are symlinks with variables in them and when you access the symlinks the variables are replaced with their contents. The variables can be set per-process, per-user, or per-system.
An example can be found here and the patchset for CURRENT can be found here. This is not commited yet.
New malloc commited to CURRENT
libc’s malloc(3) implementation has been replaced with Jason Evans’ newer version that should be faster for SMP systems. For now, all debugging, sanity, and statistics gathering options are enabled in order to find any problems. So your programs will run slower and willl have a larger memory footprint until debugging is disabled.
Ruby 1.8.4 testers wanted
The update to Ruby 1.8.4 is pending and testers are wanted. The patch (get it here) requires some testing as the last update (to Ruby 1.8.3) was rolled back due to plist issues. After the 1.8.4 update, Pav Lucistnik wants to phase out Ruby 1.6 support.
Security Advisories
Four security advisories were released (1,2,3,4). The most serious one affects ipfw as ICMP IP fragments can crash the firewall.
(There are also two security fixes and two reliability fixes for OpenBSD, check the errata for details)
Call for FreeBSD Status Reports
Max Laier called for the FreeBSD status reports. The reports are due on January 20th and the report will be published shortly afterwards.
UPDATE:
Ruby 1.8.4 is now in the tree.
UPDATE 2:
There is another security advisory for FreeBSD about a IEEE 802.11 buffer overflow. Details here.
