Release Notes for FreeNAS 8.0 Release Candidate 4
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Release Candidate 4 contains both bug fixes and new functionality over previous
Release candidates and betas.

FreeNAS 8 should be installed to a USB stick or Compact Flash device. It
requires a device of at least 1 GB in size. In a departure from FreeNAS 0.7
releases, the OS drive can not be used as a component for a volume, nor can
it be partitioned for sharing.

New in 8.0-RC4:

Snapshot functionality has been added. There are features to create periodic
snapshot jobs, create one time snapshots, clone snapshots (which can then be
exported as shares like any other dataset) and rollback to previous snapshot.

VLAN interfaces are fully supported. VLANs can be created from the GUI or
from the CLI menu on the console.

NFS shares can be set to use the full range of maproot and mapall options. In
addition, tuning is available for the NFS service to boost performance past
gigE networking speeds.

Users and groups available to the system from any source (local users, LDAP, AD)
are now presented anywhere a user or group is specified, whether it's volume
permissions, samba anonymous user, or NFS maproot.

Several functions in System -> advanced were hooked up, a few were deleted.
Powerd now works, toggling between the CLI script and a normal login works,
the MOTD updates properly, and the serial console works.

The kernel modules to support several RAID controllers were added, as well
as the modules to enable mount_smbfs to work from the CLI.

Thanks to several users in the community, multiple issues with AFP have been
resolved.

Several ZFS options have been exposed to the GUI, and the ability to edit
ZFS options such as quotas, compression, reservations on existing volumes
and datasets has been added.

Notable bug fixes:

Several errors that were causing volume creation to fail have been resolved.

User passwords were not propagating to the password files properly on creation,
this was causing issues with ssh access as well as samba access.

iSCSI device extents were not being dropped from the database correctly when
they were deleted, leading to devices "vanishing" from the GUI.

A bug in the way FreeBSD handles empty removable devices was causing processing
of the disk list to fail. If the kernel placed certain removable disks before
traditional disks the failure of the processing would stop the GUI from recognizing
all of the latter devices.

Lockd and statd were not starting when the NFS service was started.


Errata:

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UPGRADES FROM FREENAS 0.7x ARE UNSUPPORTED

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Usability of this Release Candidate:

At this point the feature set of FreeNAS 8 is complete enough to perform file
sharing tasks via NFS or Samba, using local users, AD, or LDAP, as well as
allowing the system to operate as an iSCSI target. The base technology of
FreeBSD, ZFS, Samba, and NFS is very stable and very well tested. While there
isn't an upgrade path from other storage solutions, including previous FreeNAS
0.7 releases, the system is suitable for new deployments provided the
feature set is a good match for the requirements.

A note about versions:

There's been a huge jump in version numbers. The intention is to have the
version number reflect the base version of FreeBSD used. This RC is based
on FreeBSD 8.2, but this version of FreeNAS is called 8.0 as there are future
plans to add functionality that will get the versions caught up. Once
FreeNAS 8.2 is out, a suffix will be added, such as 8.2.1, 8.2.2, etc.

A note about filesystem technologies:

While this system does support UFS based volumes, such as gmirror, gstripe,
graid3, the primary focus is on ZFS. Many of the features are provided via
ZFS datasets, such as the ability to share subsets of volumes via CIFS.
This delta is likely to increase over time, the compelling reasons to use
ZFS are likely to increase as well. It is highly recommended to use ZFS
for new volumes, even if the underlying device is a volume exported by a
hardware RAID controller.

Upgrade images:

The following two upgrade images are available for versions of FreeNAS 8 that
have GUI upgrade capability.

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Future plans:

Barring major bugs this is likely the last release candidate before 8.0-RELEASE.
There is one last bit of new functionality, which is GUI replacement of drives in
volumes, and a few small pieces, such as the ability to edit powerd settings in the
GUI.