FreeBSD 5.4-RC1 is available

From: Ken Smith (kensmith_at_FreeBSD.org)
Date: 04/05/05

  • Next message: Christian Laursen: "Re: 5.4-PRERELEASE pccard problem" 
    Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 10:49:35 -0400
To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org

    Announcement
    ------------

    The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability
    of FreeBSD 5.4-RC1, the first Release Candidate of the FreeBSD 5.4 release
    cycle. Much effort has been put into fixing a wide variety of problems
    identified in FreeBSD 5.3.

    It is important to check the "Known Issues" section below. In particular
    two strictly local security issues came up after the RC1 builds had completed
    and were made available to mirror sites but before this announcement.

    We encourage people to help with testing so any final bugs can be identified
    and worked out. At this point the only major problem has been reports
    of large server (4 processors or more) hanging under extreme load conditions
    (varied load of local processes like database and heavy network load).
    Details to help with debugging have been hard to obtain so if anyone is
    in a position to help with trying to reproduce this it would be appreciated.

    The layout of the installation CDs is slightly different than previous
    releases. The disc1 image should be used to start the install. It
    contains a "live filesystem" and the set of packages that normally get
    installed as part of a minimal install (perl, the baseline Xorg windowing
    system, and on i386 the base Linux emulation package). The disc2 image
    contains a larger variety of packages (kde3, gnome2, etc) that can be
    installed while doing the initial installation of the machine, but if
    you just want to do a minimal install disc1 should be all you need.

    Availability of ISO images and support for doing FTP based installs is given
    below. If you have an older system you want to update using the normal
    CVS/cvsup source based upgrade the branch tag to use is RELENG_5_4. Problem
    reports can be submitted using the send-pr(1) command, and/or posted to
    the "freebsd-stable@freebsd.org" mailing list.

    A schedule and the current todo list for the 5.4 Release Cycle are available:

      http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/schedule.html
      http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/todo.html

    Known Issues
    ------------

    Two strictly local security issues came along after the RC1 builds had
    completed and were made available to the FTP mirror sites so it was too
    late to re-roll the RC1 images. Please take a look at the Security
    Advisories to see if they are something you need to be concerned with
    before installing RC1. The fixes for the first (FreeBSD-SA-05:02.sendfile)
    have already been applied to RELENG_5_4 (so if you use CVS/cvsup to upgrade
    you will get those fixes). The fixes for the second, which will be
    FreeBSD-SA-05:03.amd64, are still being processed. This second Security
    Advisory only effects the amd64 architecture, and the vulnerability is
    quite obscure.

    There is also a problem with installing for some combinations of ATAPI
    CDROM's and controllers. This is seen most often on SunBlade-100 model
    sparc64 machines though it is occasionally seen on other architectures.
    If installing from CD fails with read errors from the CD you can try
    breaking to the boot loader as the boot starts and enter the commands:

            set hw.ata.atapi_dma=0
            boot

    to turn off DMA mode for the CDROM. This will be made the default mode
    before the next RC.

    The packages being provided as part of RC1 are close to being the final
    set that will be provided with the final release but there are still a
    few minor glitches being worked out with a couple of the packages. The
    next RC should have most of these glitches fixed.

    Availability
    ------------

    The RC1 ISOs and FTP support for amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 are available
    now on most of the FreeBSD Mirror sites. The alpha and ia64 RC1 builds are
    still in progress and should be available within a day or two. A list of the
    mirror sites is available here:

      http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html

    The MD5s of the currently available ISO images are:

      MD5 (5.4-RC1-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 25b1ba77b92fbabe3c6f9a6ebf5e81e3
      MD5 (5.4-RC1-amd64-disc1.iso) = 765a61161612c40d40329962b7548815
      MD5 (5.4-RC1-amd64-disc2.iso) = 8ea253a82e074e72bf4f051aafad1b47

      MD5 (5.4-RC1-i386-bootonly.iso) = 03fe99fac40780e295b43c1fdbc65273
      MD5 (5.4-RC1-i386-disc1.iso) = 187313ec23d441820f66b9d4046d5fb3
      MD5 (5.4-RC1-i386-disc2.iso) = f020c3c538bb9b1f6ac96701814a6a04

      MD5 (5.4-RC1-pc98-disc1.iso) = deca1dc19120325fc5e6561d928ab29c

      MD5 (5.4-RC1-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = 54fdffa78f2d2ef35866d88f4bfe5cb0
      MD5 (5.4-RC1-sparc64-disc1.iso) = 62f7cd03187d9cccb4707fdac318c461
      MD5 (5.4-RC1-sparc64-disc2.iso) = ea4e6dc57af0bfe83c60d0596c03a453

    -ken

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