5.3-BETA5 Available

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the 
availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA5.  This is the fifth 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.  BIND9 is being imported and will
be part of the 5.3 release.  We will add at least one more beta (BETA6)
to accomodate testing.  Users of the named daemon should visit the ISC
website for information about migrating to BIND9.

Fixes and Enhancements made since BETA4:

    - Updated floppy device driver (testers trying out floppies on your
      systems would be appreciated).  This fixes a lot of problems with
      floppy drives not being probed/attached.
    - Fix for panics on certain hardware during boot if no media in the
      cdrom drive.
    - Change to pf logging format to handle 64-bit time.  If updating an
      older system remove /var/log/pflog before restarting pf.
    - Many more scheduler fixes, we encourage testers to turn PREEMPTION on.
    - Many fixes to bpf locking.
    - if_re locking added.  Problems reported with jumbo frames, fix being
      tested.
    - debug.witness_watch moved to debug.witness.watch (old name left but
      depreciated).
    - Fix to GBDE key management.  If you have specified 4 keys or fewer,
      you will need to dump your data, re-run gbde init, and restore your
      data.
    - Add if_vge driver
    - Fix to rare VM corruption bug on i386/amd64.
    - Fix to SCSI sync speed in esp(4) driver.
    - Fix timeout problems with ppp over if_xl interface.
    - Misc. network stack locking fixes.
    - Fix lock order reversal in sound system.
    - Support round-robin and verify modes in geom raid3.
    - Misc. fixes to usb.
    - Misc. mac fixes.
    - Fixes to geom_mirror.
    - Many updates to docs, including a new 5.3 Migration Guide.

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.  The problem
      has been tracked to gvinum and a fix will be in BETA6.
    - 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.
    - There are reports of packet corruption with the nge(1) driver when
      the network stack is run without Giant.  A fix is being tested.

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

        alpha: images available some time tomorrow
        amd64: all images available
        i386: all images available
        ia64: miniinst available
        pc98: miniinst available
        sparc64: all images available

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

      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 5be9dba4c354b13c18c06fcde98291b5
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-amd64-disc2.iso) = 3117bf2e2b62b62c681602573433355e
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-amd64-miniinst.iso) = 84caa18e4f863b393513fb68a3dc977e
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-amd64-disc1.iso) = 5ac33f05c3550d7bb7ebf22263c412c9

      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-i386-bootonly.iso) = f819ea29a8c07094eca4d04eb0fef869
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-i386-disc2.iso) = 7506ee9ceb8150466439372d36ca9489
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-i386-miniinst.iso) = 57926ee792b68c884df3436a4c33ba12
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-i386-disc1.iso) = 6592143d429f7cf4770f1166c3202f54

      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-ia64-bootonly.iso) = bd532c346fc52e42fa2baa97b6ebc3ed
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-ia64-disc2.iso) = 5c115101e8b885c41c8122a4e14f30ab
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-ia64-miniinst.iso) = 98eed6eb8ba5283225a2cd1a5bb5f920

      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-pc98-disc2.iso) = ef7ce632c2253f02d078a9e154a1fa6c
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-pc98-miniinst.iso) = 2612557f8cf81ab20b8bdca9481c78c5

      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = cfb13e419f9ef30a4d9f4ef3dd11e381
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-sparc64-disc1.iso) = b71b08fd7e6c5b53158d2b78ead10ae2
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-sparc64-disc2.iso) = 7984c0396a63f8e6b0403f5ed19e4199
      MD5 (5.3-BETA5-sparc64-miniinst.iso) = e5ed673501f8d4e85a28b35db69b793a

-ken