molotov
October 7th, 2004, 18:39
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the
availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA7. This is the seventh and final
BETA of the 5.3 release cycle. It is intended for early adopters and
those wishing to help find and/or fix bugs. The 5.3 release cycle will
follow on next with an RC1 release candidate unless significant show-
stopper bugs are found. The schedule can be found at
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/schedule.html. Be sure to check
the "Known Issues" below as there are known problems that are still
being worked on at this time.

IMPORTANT:
BIND 9.3.0 has replaced BIND 8.x as the default name server.

IMPORTANT:
Several libraries have had their version numbers bumped in order to
maintain FreeBSD 4.x compatibility. Any programs that rely on these
libraries should be rebuilt. The /etc/libmap.conf facility can be
used to help this migration. In particular, libm.so.2 should be
mapped to libm.so.3 while the migration is in progress. The libraries
that changed are:

libm.so.2 -> libm.so.3
libhistory.so.4 -> libhistory.so.5
libopie.so.2 -> libopie.so.3
libpcap.so.2 -> libpcap.so.3
libreadline.so.4 -> libreadline.so.5

Other fixes and enhancements made since BETA6:

- Fix timekeeping on sparc64 and alpha that would result in the day of
the week being stored incorrectly in NVRAM.
- Add support to the fxp driver for the ICH6 chipset.
- Fix the panic on detach problem with USB hubs.
- Import BIND 9.3.0. This completely replaces the old BIND 8.x
nameserver in the base system. Many thanks to Dag-Erling Smørgrav,
Tom Rhodes, Doug Barton, and Ruslan Ermilov for making this happen.
- Fix panic when allocating swap on a busy system.
- Fix loader crash when using the 'lsdev' command.
- Many more GBDE, ggate, gmirror, and gstripe fixes.
- Fix the '-s' option in newfs to handle large filesystems.
- Fix a resource allocation problem with the floppy driver that would
result in long delays during boot.
- Add support for the Broadcom 5750/5751 chips to the bge driver.
- Allow 'sh' to handle unsetting of undefined variables.
- Fix several locking problems in PF.
- Many fixes to the ATA driver to make it more robust.
- Many locking fixes for the re driver.
- Work around a panic on sparc64 SMP systems when under heavy load.
- Fix handling of non-existent devices at boot for getty.
- Disable Synaptics touchpad support in the psm driver as it was
causing many problem reports.
- Fix the em driver to not wedge when under heavy transmit load.
- Fix KAME IPSEC and FAST IPSEC.
- Fix the pst driver to not panic on boot when INVARIANTS is defined.

Known issues in this release:

- There are known data corruption issues with gvinum. Fixes are
being tested now.
- There are reports of packet corruption with the nge driver when
the network stack is run without the Giant mutex. A fix is
being tested.

Availability:

For people wishing to upgrade older systems using cvsup(1) and the
procedure described in src/UPDATING the CVS tag to use is RELENG_5
at this point. Note that like all RELENG_X branches this is an
active development branch. We do not recommend those branches for
normal use (for normal use RELENG_X_Y branches are more appropriate,
e.g. RELENG_4_10 is the current stable branch).

As of this writing the following are available on ftp.freebsd.org
along with some of the mirror sites:

alpha: all images available
amd64: all images available
i386: all images available
ia64: miniinst available
pc98: miniinst available
sparc64: all images except disc1 available (new package sets
still being built, disc1 may be made available later)

MD5s for the builds that are complete at this time are:

MD5 (5.3-BETA7-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 0ec066fb157784e79a6a88f3d2191574
MD5 (5.3-BETA7-amd64-disc2.iso) = 009d7cc50bec635ae1883ef3de40b122
MD5 (5.3-BETA7-amd64-miniinst.iso) = 952c987ab87774dc391c0774eb87eed7
MD5 (5.3-BETA7-amd64-disc1.iso) = 7826043ff52b3e9e2f4443517d362a8d

MD5 (5.3-BETA7-i386-bootonly.iso) = 13e3b9c84f86c61461030e40adb895ee
MD5 (5.3-BETA7-i386-disc2.iso) = 4812cda4404454cf2ef7e92722156f37
MD5 (5.3-BETA7-i386-miniinst.iso) = 5cf967bfd44543f0afdf5a9449734051
MD5 (5.3-BETA7-i386-disc1.iso) = f8873a9b1072fdc6ca9d5f0c1fe58c73

MD5 (5.3-BETA7-ia64-bootonly.iso) = b1089e7493a207ba32c0cb68098ceb2e
MD5 (5.3-BETA7-ia64-disc2.iso) = 0d20ca0788ff4c1be75be2dbedb37579
MD5 (5.3-BETA7-ia64-miniinst.iso) = c85ce87890f0fa053f14bd134e57fc2c

MD5 (5.3-BETA7-pc98-disc2.iso) = c8cbaa0568b0df28c2ae3d39bcdbb62f
MD5 (5.3-BETA7-pc98-miniinst.iso) = f6677efe217e0d5d2f207fb39d849294

MD5 (5.3-BETA7-sparc64-bootonly.iso) =
203ced5fa0fb7a1cb44c0548b8449601
MD5 (5.3-BETA7-sparc64-disc2.iso) = 8462696261f696a9391d4a27a56b1bbe
MD5 (5.3-BETA7-sparc64-miniinst.iso) = dc4225c8d18127b5ce93cf650cc1458e

bumbler
October 9th, 2004, 17:36
I usually wait a few days before I try to download updates. After bypassing Beta6, I went ahead and took Beta7. After about 24 hours of testing, I believe it is just noticably zippier. Also my display is slightly sharper, though I can't imagine why.

Bumbler