FreeBSD 7.0-RC2 Available

The second Release Candidate for FreeBSD 7.0 is now available on most of
the FTP mirror sites, for example

  ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/{$arch}/ISO-IMAGES/7.0/

(where ${arch} is your machine's architecture, e.g. amd64, i386, etc).
If you can please try a "local mirror" please.

Users of i386 or amd64 systems running FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE, 6.3-BETA*,
6.3-RC*, 6.3-RELEASE, 7.0-BETA*, or 7.0-RC1 may wish to perform a binary
upgrade to 7.0-RC2 using code recently added to the freebsd-update
utility.  On systems running 7.0-BETA4 or 7.0-RC1, the instructions for
"minor upgrades" at:

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-11-10-freebsd-minor-version-upgrade.html

should be followed for this purpose; on systems running older releases
or BETAs (including 7.0 BETAs prior to BETA4) the lengthier instructions
for "major upgrades" at:

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-11-11-freebsd-major-version-upgrade.html

(which include rebuilding all software installed from the ports tree)
should be followed.

There is one known issue with a very recently MFCed portion of the
ciss(4) driver that was discovered a little too late for -RC2 but will
be fixed for the release.  Some though not all machines have a problem
with a feature added to solve other machines' problems with "Adapter
Heartbeat Failed" so that portion will be turned into a tunable with the
default disabling it.  If you update an already running machine and the
new driver causes you problems you can boot the older kernel, and see
v1.87 of sys/dev/ciss/ciss.c in HEAD for how to fix it (that is what
will be MFCed before the release).

We sincerely hope this will be the last of the public tests for 7.0 and
that the -RELEASE builds will start in about a week and a half.  If
bug(s) considered big enough to be show-stoppers are found we will of
course reconsider but hopefully we're in good enough shape now to
proceed with the release.

Thanks for all the help/testing.

-- 
                                                Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith_at_cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |