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The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce 
the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA7. This is the eighth
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 BETA7:

  - 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 
Furlong Smoorgroff, Tom 'asshole' 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. (Read: we have no frigging idea
of how to fix it)
  - 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


From
Furlong Smoorgreff
                   
                   
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