FreeBSD 5.3-BETA2 Available

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the 
availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA2.  This is the second 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.

Fixes made since BETA1:

    - IPI fix, this should resolve the SMP problems reported in the
      BETA1 release notes.
    - Many tweaks to network stack locking.
    - Alpha boot loader fixed.
    - Misc. acpi fixes.
    - Fix to agp handling that prevented pc98 from building.
    - TLS fix for static threaded programs.
    - Netgraph modules built for all architectures.
    - twa(4) support on amd64.
    - lnc(4) fix that allows FreeBSD to access the network interface
      inside VMWare.

Known issues in this release:

    - There are scattered reports of data corruption on SMP systems
      under high load.  This could be due to a known bug in the gvinum
      subsystem, but it could be due to unknown factors.  We are
      investigating this and hope to correct it soon.
    - debug.mpsafenet (multi-processor safe network stack) is still
      turned off by default for BETA2 but will be turned on for BETA3.
      Testers are encouraged to experiment with turning it on manually
      to get some early feedback.
    - pst(4) is known to cause a system panic during the boot time.
    - 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.  The problem has been identified but
      a fix is still in the works.
    - 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:

    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:

        i386: available on most mirror sites, miniinst and disc1 but
              disc1 package set missing a few packages
        sparc64: build complete, available on many mirror sites,
                 miniinst only

    Builds for the other architectures are in varying stages, they should
    be posted through the next few days.

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

      MD5 (5.3-BETA2-i386-bootonly.iso) = 71a9a573d5592cb4f689da2c19e462dd
      MD5 (5.3-BETA2-i386-disc1.iso) = 94a2e0839e4a02a4361059c964c592d6
      MD5 (5.3-BETA2-i386-disc2.iso) = 45765c7c1e5bbe592e9e38a0fc0935d1
      MD5 (5.3-BETA2-i386-miniinst.iso) = 5bc609d1304e6d256b5ac3fae33a0aa0

      MD5 (5.3-BETA2-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = 7790bdd2c7e4d2779246fc0e1ef115a5
      MD5 (5.3-BETA2-sparc64-disc2.iso) = 819c4efc64fc066a56a49ba034410f85
      MD5 (5.3-BETA2-sparc64-miniinst.iso) = edf1b370a86e11b0629a4ac17dc29da1

-ken