[molotov]

5.3Beta3 has been tagged, expect iso's sometime in the next few days. Gotta give those mirrors time to update and prepare for the bandwidth spikes an all :-)

[molotov]

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