* buffer: Fixed a minor errors that was causing crashes
  (Michaël Zasso) #2635,
* child_process: Fix error that was causing crashes (Evan Lucas) #2727
* crypto: Replace use of rwlocks, unsafe on Windows XP / 2003
  (Ben Noordhuis) #2723
* libuv: Upgrade from 1.7.3 to 1.7.4 (Saúl Ibarra Corretgé) #2817
* node: Fix faulty process.release.libUrl on Windows (Rod Vagg) #2699
* node-gyp: Float v3.0.3 which has improved support for Node.js and
  io.js v0.10 to v4+ (Rod Vagg) #2700
* npm: Upgrade to version 2.14.3 from 2.13.3, includes a security
  update, see https://github.com/npm/npm/releases/tag/v2.14.2 for more
  details, (Kat Marchán) #2696.
* timers: Improved timer performance from porting the 0.12
  implementation, plus minor fixes (Jeremiah Senkpiel) #2540,
  (Julien Gilli) nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#8751 nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#8905

PR-URL: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/2698

Notable changes:

* build: Add a --link-module option to configure that can be used to
  bundle additional JavaScript modules into a built binary
  (Bradley Meck) #2497
* docs: Merge outstanding doc updates from joyent/node
  (James M Snell) #2378
* http_parser: Significant performance improvement by having
  http.Server consume all initial data from its net.Socket and parsing
  directly without having to enter JavaScript. Any 'data' listeners on
  the net.Socket will result in the data being "unconsumed" into
  JavaScript, thereby undoing any performance gains.
  (Fedor Indutny) #2355
* libuv: Upgrade to 1.7.3 (from 1.6.1), see
  https://github.com/libuv/libuv/blob/v1.x/ChangeLog for details
  (Saúl Ibarra Corretgé) #2310
* V8: Upgrade to 4.4.63.30 (from 4.4.63.26) (Michaël Zasso) #2482

Notable changes:

* events: Added EventEmitter#listenerCount(event) as a replacement for
  EventEmitter.listenerCount(emitter, event), which has now been
  marked as deprecated in the docs. (Sakthipriyan Vairamani) #2349
* module: Fixed an error with preloaded modules when the current
  working directory doesn't exist. (Bradley Meck) #2353
* node: Startup time is now about 5% faster when not passing V8 flags.
  (Evan Lucas) #2483
* repl: Tab-completion now works better with arrays.
  (James M Snell) #2409
* string_bytes: Fixed an unaligned write in the handling of UCS2
  encoding. (Fedor Indutny) #2480
* tls: Added a new --tls-cipher-list flag that can be used to override
  the built-in default cipher list. (James M Snell) #2412

PR-URL: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/2347

Notable changes:

* buffer: Fixed a couple large memory leaks (Ben Noordhuis)
https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/2352.
* crypto:
  - Fixed a couple of minor memory leaks (Karl Skomski)
https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/2375.
  - Signing now checks for OpenSSL errors (P.S.V.R)
https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/2342. **Note that this may expose
previously hidden errors in user code.**
* intl: Intl using small-icu is now enabled by default in builds
(Steven R. Loomis) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/2264.
  - `String#normalize()` can now be used for unicode
normalization.
  - The `Intl` object and various `String` and `Number` methods are
present, but only support the English locale.
  - For support of all locales, node must be built with full-icu.
* tls: Fixed tls throughput being much lower after an incorrect merge
(Fedor Indutny) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/2381.
* tools: The v8 tick processor now comes bundled with node (Matt
Loring) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/2090.
  - This can be used by producing performance profiling output by
running node with `--perf`, then running your appropriate platform's
script on the output as found in
https://github.com/nodejs/node/tree/master/tools/v8-prof.
* util: `util.inspect(obj)` now prints the constructor name of the
object if there is one (Christopher Monsanto)
https://github.com/nodejs/io.js/pull/1935.

PR-URL: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/2347

Notable changes:

* buffer:
  - Due to changes in V8, it has been necessary to reimplement Buffer
    on top of V8's Uint8Array. While every effort has been made to
    maintain performance, users are likely to experience a different
    performance profile depending on how Buffer is used.
    (Trevor Norris) #1825.
  - Buffer can now take ArrayBuffers as a constructor argument
    (Trevor Norris) #2002.
  - When a single buffer is passed to Buffer.concat(), a new, copied
    Buffer object will be returned; previous behavior was to return
    the original Buffer object (Sakthipriyan Vairamani) #1937.
* build: PPC support has been added to core to allow compiling on
  pLinux BE and LE (AIX support coming soon) (Michael Dawson) #2124.
* dgram: If an error occurs within socket.send() and a callback has
  been provided, the error is only passed as the first argument to the
  callback and not emitted on the socket object; previous behavior was
  to do both (Matteo Collina & Chris Dickinson) #1796
* freelist: Deprecate the undocumented freelist core module
  (Sakthipriyan Vairamani) #2176.
* http:
  - Status codes now all use the official IANA names as per RFC7231,
    e.g. http.STATUS_CODES[414] now returns 'URI Too Long' rather than
    'Request-URI Too Large' (jomo) #1470.
  - Calling .getName() on an HTTP agent no longer returns a trailing
    colon, HTTPS agents will no longer return an extra colon near the
    middle of the string (Brendan Ashworth) #1617.
* node:
  - NODE_MODULE_VERSION has been bumped to 45 to reflect the break in
    ABI (Rod Vagg) #2096.
  - Introduce a new process.release object that contains a name
    property set to 'io.js' and sourceUrl, headersUrl and libUrl
    (Windows only) properties containing URLs for the relevant
    resources; this is intended to be used by node-gyp
    (Rod Vagg) #2154.
  - The version of node-gyp bundled with io.js now downloads and uses
    a tarball of header files from iojs.org rather than the full
    source for compiling native add-ons; it is hoped this is a
    temporary floating patch and the change will be upstreamed to
    node-gyp soon (Rod Vagg) #2066.
* repl: Persistent history is now enabled by default. The history file
  is located at ~/.node_repl_history, which can be overridden by the
  new environment variable NODE_REPL_HISTORY. This deprecates the
  previous NODE_REPL_HISTORY_FILE variable. Additionally, the format
  of the file has been changed to plain text to better handle file
  corruption. (Jeremiah Senkpiel) #2224.
* smalloc: The smalloc module has been removed as it is no longer
  possible to provide the API due to changes in V8
  (Ben Noordhuis) #2022.
* tls: Add server.getTicketKeys() and server.setTicketKeys() methods
  for TLS session key rotation (Fedor Indutny) #2227.
* v8: Upgraded to 4.4.63.26
  - ES6: Enabled computed property names
  - ES6: Array can now be subclassed in strict mode
  - ES6: Implement rest parameters in staging, use the
    --harmony-rest-parameters command line flag
  - ES6: Implement the spread operator in staging, use the
    --harmony-spreadcalls command line flag
  - Removed SetIndexedPropertiesToExternalArrayData and related APIs,
    forcing a shift to Buffer to be reimplemented based on Uint8Array
  - Introduction of Maybe and MaybeLocal C++ API for objects which may
    or may not have a value.
  - Added support for PPC

PR-URL: https://github.com/nodejs/io.js/pull/2299