FreeBSD 5.3-BETA1 Available

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the 
availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA1.  This is the first 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 continue with
weekly BETA builds while bugs are being fixed and features finalized.
The schedule is at http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/schedule.html.
Be sure to check the "Known issues" below, there are known problems
still being worked on at this time.

Significant improvements in features, performance and stability have
been made since FreeBSD 5.2.1 was released last February.  These
include:

    Fully threaded and multi-processor safe network stack.  This is 
    disabled in this BETA but can be enabled by setting the 
    'debug.mpsafenet' variable at boot.  This feature is not available
    for all network cards and protocols, but should work for normal
    IPv4 traffic and many common network cards.  For more details see:
http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/netperf/20040822-netperf-current-post.txt

    The default X-windows system is now X.org instead of XFree86.

    Many ACPI enhancements.

    GCC updated to 3.4.2, gdb updated to 6.1.1, binutils updated.

    The size of the time_t structure has been change to 64-bits for
    the sparc64 port.  WARNING: if using cvsup to upgrade an earlier
    release on sparc64 be sure to follow the instructions provided in
    "/usr/src/UPDATING.64BTT".

    Much more but this announcement is already getting a bit long for
    a BETA announcement.

Known issues in this release:

    Recent work appears to have resulted in some SMP stability
    problems under load that can result in a hard lock up.  The
    problem is being actively worked on and should be resolved
    for BETA2.  People with multi-processor machines are advised
    to wait for BETA2.

    pst(4) is known to cause a system panic during the boot time.
    This will be resolved for the release.

    Configuring X11 in sysinstall does not work.  Just wait until the
    system is running after the installation finishes to configure the
    X-windows system.  If you use disc1 the X.org packages will have
    been installed but not configured.  See the xorg(1) manual for
    details (running 'Xorg -configure' may be all it takes).

    The Synaptics Touchpad mouse support is known to have issues with
    responsiveness.  It can be disabled with 'hint.psm.0.flags="0x200"'
    in "/boot/device.hints".  This will be resolved for the release.

    On sparc64 only, there is a problem using ATA devices in DMA
    mode.  The loader has been temporarily set up to disable DMA
    in the ATA device driver.

    Kernel debugging aids (INVARIANTS, WITNESS, etc) are still enabled
    so do not use this BETA as an indication of speed.

    A complete list of defects that will be fixed for the release can be
    found at http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/todo.html.

Availability:

    At the time of this announcement the BETA1 materials for the most
    popular architectures are available on ftp.freebsd.org as well as
    a few of the other mirror sites.  It should be available on the
    majority of the mirror sites within the next day.  A few of the
    less popular architectures are still building and will be uploaded
    as the builds complete.  The Alpha architecture will not be built
    for BETA1 but should be available for future BETA's.

    As of this writing:

        i386: available on most mirror sites, miniinst and disc1 but
              disc1 package set missing a few packages
        sparc64: available on some of the mirror sites, miniinst only
        ia64: only partially loaded, should become available later tonight
        amd64: build still in progress, hopefully available tomorrow
        pc98: build still in progress, hopefully available tomorrow

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

      MD5 (5.3-BETA1-i386-bootonly.iso) = 8185c80e2b4892648422faf72350a99a
      MD5 (5.3-BETA1-i386-disc1.iso) = cd0822a5896eff43f1176cf92bc0670a
      MD5 (5.3-BETA1-i386-disc2.iso) = da262515cebf33da1b862124339691a2
      MD5 (5.3-BETA1-i386-miniinst.iso) = 93ab2526b98851e2ed35ec0bc2802095

      MD5 (5.3-BETA1-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = c93b342d419863ca83930e131f76c16a
      MD5 (5.3-BETA1-sparc64-disc2.iso) = dfd6b80eaa7869350fa996eb59638548
      MD5 (5.3-BETA1-sparc64-miniinst.iso) = 0639806884c4b36addf89b71f79e3566

-ken