FreeBSD/i386 installed on ZFS may crash during boot when the ZFS pool mount is attempted while booting an unmodified GENERIC kernel.

A system tunable has been added as of revision r286584 to make the kern.kstack_pages tunable configurable without recompiling the kernel.

To mitigate system crashes with such configurations, choose Escape to loader prompt in the boot menu and enter the following lines from loader(8) prompt, after an OK:

set kern.kstack_pages=4
boot

Add this line to /boot/loader.conf for the change to persist across reboots:

kern.kstack_pages=4

[2017-07-21] Due to a bug in earlier versions of clang(1) that is difficult to work around in the upgrade process, to upgrade the system from sources via buildworld to -CURRENT or 11.1-RELEASE, it is necessary to upgrade machines running 9.x to at least revision r286035, or machines running 10.x to revision r286033. Source-based upgrades from 10.3-RELEASE are not affected. This differs from the historical situation where one could generally upgrade from anywhere on earlier stable branches, so caution should be exercised.

[2017-07-25] FreeBSD/arm64 currently lacks EFI real-time clock (RTC) support, which may cause the system to boot with the wrong time set.

As a workaround, either enable ntpdate(8) or include ntpd_sync_on_start="YES" in rc.conf(5).

[2017-07-25] A late issue was discovered with FreeBSD/arm64 and "root on ZFS" installations where the root ZFS pool would fail to be located.

There currently is no workaround.

[2017-07-26] Note for those upgrading from 11.1-RC2 in VirtualBox:

If system panics were experienced when upgrading from 11.1-RC1 to 11.1-RC2, and the emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions{,-nox11} port was built locally as a resolution, the port will either need to be rebuilt when upgrading from 11.1-RC2 to 11.1-RELEASE, or reinstall the package from the pkg(8) mirrors using either:

 # pkg install -f virtualbox-ose-additions

or

 # pkg install -f virtualbox-ose-additions-nox11

To ensure the system does not panic after rebooting into the updated kernel, it is recommended to disable the vboxguest service in rc.conf(5) prior to rebooting the system if possible, or use pkg(8) to forcefully reinstall the package.

Systems being upgraded from 11.1-RC1 and earlier and 11.1-RC3 to 11.1-RELEASE should be unaffected.

[2017-07-27] The release notes erroneously state revision r315330 was sponsored by Rubicon Communications, LLC (Netgate), when in fact this work was done by Hiroki Mori independently.

[2017-08-09] The release notes stated the ruptime(1), rwho(1), and rwhod(8) utilities have been marked "deprecated", however this change was reversed in 12.0-CURRENT.

The other utilities mentioned in the entry in the release notes, however, are unchanged.

[2017-11-06] An issue with FreeBSD virtual machines with vagrant was discovered that affects the VirtualBox where the virtual machine will not start on the initial boot invoked with vagrant up.

The issue is due to the virtual machine MAC being unset, as FreeBSD does not provide a default Vagrantfile.

It has been observed, however, that a subsequent invocation of vagrant up will allow the virtual machine to successfully boot, allowing access via vagrant ssh.