BETA3 Release Notes

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the
availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA3.  This is the third 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 and Enhancements made since BETA2:

     - MP-safe network stack is now enabled by default.
     - Add support for loadable modules on amd64.
     - Misc. acpi fixes.
     - Misc. fixes and enhancments (mostly gnutar compatibility) to
       bsdtar.
     - X server configuration has been removed from sysinstall, it is
       best done post-install.
     - Better ftw() and nftw() implementations imported from OpenBSD.
     - Misc. pf fixes.
     - Fix to maestro sound card driver.
     - Fix to md device driver that allowed mdconfig(8) to exit before
       filenames appeared in /dev.
     - Fixes that allow use of TGA2 adapter in Alpha.
     - Correct a denial-of-service vulnerability in zlib.
     - Misc. fixes to aic7xxx driver.
     - Fixes to schedulers.

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.
     - pst(4) is known to cause a system panic during the boot time.
     - 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 and user-level debugging aids (INVARIANTS, WITNESS,
       user-level malloc, 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, ISO images and FTP install directories are
     available for the following architectures:

         i386:  all images available
         alpha: mini ISO available
         amd64: mini ISO available, disc1 with packages will be available
                shortly
         ia64:  mini ISO available
         pc98:  mini ISO available
         sparc64: all images available

MD5 (5.3-BETA3-alpha-bootonly.iso) = 6407ae17db85361ba4194d1f53df0dd0
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-alpha-disc2.iso) = a8f07884750e60b427d309c45d86100d
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-alpha-miniinst.iso) = 74125f9ea9e215cfc9ed4f089410723c

MD5 (5.3-BETA3-amd64-bootonly.iso) = eda3bad2b1b8ad33048464277e02698c
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-amd64-disc2.iso) = 25a8bef2756548d2756d281210e3d8bd
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-amd64-miniinst.iso) = 3bbeb365d08360797a41903841ba1751

MD5 (5.3-BETA3-i386-bootonly.iso) = ca5b1cca7f677d4c456b6373f15e8e43
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-i386-disc1.iso) = 3d562562786f2ca432a8085029380f73
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-i386-disc2.iso) = c805ae7df8cd43593b080fa3300d52da
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-i386-miniinst.iso) = 900f994e1887b3c5c1d908f50f56ebbd

MD5 (5.3-BETA3-ia64-bootonly.iso) = 97c3f51233dbd2dd70cd40ed5ff9e284
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-ia64-disc2.iso) = 38b9a4620dacb5bc3157c08b1675a9ba
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-ia64-miniinst.iso) = d6a496552372ba2cbb45674f9b8d85e7

MD5 (5.3-BETA3-pc98-disc2.iso) = 034b3d37bd05ff2e68494114501cf429
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-pc98-miniinst.iso) = 535afa47704fdcb3cc63006ee0ae16f3

MD5 (5.3-BETA3-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = 97a0dfe362ad699ffc227ca418ff118a
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-sparc64-disc2.iso) = 3c096fb229c9cfa4afb47ca5b20ec3a6
MD5 (5.3-BETA3-sparc64-miniinst.iso) = 67f418e3ab03b15e934a093bac5379d1