[molotov]

Today is the the day for Beta4 to be frozen, iso hopefully soon. Also, the ports tree has been frozen for the 5.3 release, so only approved commits until 5.3-STABLE =)

To see the entire schedual check:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/schedule.html
(note: they sometimes lag behind in updating that page, beta3 for example, but we forgive them because they write such spankin nice code)

And lastly, if you have some spare time and kick major ass, take a look at the TODO list for 5.3, and give a little back via testing, docs, or code.
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/todo.html

[molotov]

a bit late but...
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the
availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA4. This is the fourth 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. At this time the Release
Engineering team anticipates releasing at least one more BETA snapshot
before the first Release Candidate. The schedule will be updated for
this shortly.

Fixed and Enhancements made since BETA3:

- ATA works on sparc64 and ia64 again. This was due to several bugs in
busdma. sparc64 no longer defaults to having ATA DMA be off.
- Better support for statically linked threaded programs in GDB.
- Support for more Broadcom and Realtek-based NICs
- Fixes for MSDOS internationalization support.
- Many fixes for ATA including speed fixes for ICH* chips, better error
recovery, and better support for devices that respond as both master
and slave.
- Various locking fixes for AIO, the network stack, and socket polling.
- The default scheduler is now 4BSD. The switch was made in the
interest maximizing stability for 5.3. Users are still encouraged to
try the the ULE scheduler, though known bugs exist with it when
PREEMPTION is also turned on.
- Kernel debugging and malloc debugging options have been turned off for
the remainder of the RELENG_5 branch.
- Merge of the massive scheduler cleanup and bug fixes from 6-CURRENT.
This addresses a number of stability problems that have existed for
over 2 months including deadlocks, randomly aborted processes, and
panics. This also improves the performance of the 4BSD scheduler by
keeping idle processors busy during light and medium loads.

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.
- There are reports of packet corruption with the nge(1) driver when the
network stack is run without Giant. These are being investigated.

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: images will be available shortly
amd64: all images available
ia64: mini ISO available
pc98: mini ISO available
sparc64: mini ISO available, full disc1 will be available soon

MD5 (5.3-BETA4-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 7f75a2e07f8bbcadd9b9e3d7cee06677
MD5 (5.3-BETA4-amd64-disc2.iso) = d98c8be8c48afcacffaa910241ca7f35
MD5 (5.3-BETA4-amd64-miniinst.iso) = 9a1fb23cfc58f7c4261a2150a5b28670
MD5 (5.3-BETA4-amd64-disc1.iso) = 678f953a4631db3aeb91120d9123d646

MD5 (5.3-BETA4-i386-bootonly.iso) = 82f3bd499d2241340bc219660f3acf1c
MD5 (5.3-BETA4-i386-disc2.iso) = 7da064e4b47726873376a14becd840fd
MD5 (5.3-BETA4-i386-miniinst.iso) = f333569c4436256740e8be8c68f8d54d
MD5 (5.3-BETA4-i386-disc1.iso) = 380d3a63a817feeb1650e6b3d07505ce

MD5 (5.3-BETA4-ia64-bootonly.iso) = ca272a954af6b5f10e1abb59fefd5d51
MD5 (5.3-BETA4-ia64-disc2.iso) = 189e6dd0a9d6be10ba5cd0d2e4ffd4ea
MD5 (5.3-BETA4-ia64-miniinst.iso) = d5b38b5add52de5b00b9294af99ae5bb

MD5 (5.3-BETA4-pc98-disc2.iso) = 855de6f83c403a4748d083c9759aa5ec
MD5 (5.3-BETA4-pc98-miniinst.iso) = cfc61e3273757099c1e83589fcbd7495
MD5 (5.3-BETA4.tar.bz2) = e2853d340d12f340fe8eb482e0a1fc33

MD5 (5.3-BETA4-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = 07c4e060e41fc0bf78923d9fe4deac03
MD5 (5.3-BETA4-sparc64-disc2.iso) = dfe6f9eb046aa46e33d750572bd25c50
MD5 (5.3-BETA4-sparc64-miniinst.iso) = 4310a4f4cfefcafc9b3b902fe1763870

The Release Engineering Team

[bumbler]

I'm a little confused here. I read where the floppy driver was still broken, but I don't see it on the list of things to be fixed. Mine still comes back as failure to read during boot. Is this something they are going to fix, or is it supposed to be fixed already?