molotov
October 20th, 2004, 20:57
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the
availability of FreeBSD 5.3-RC1. It is intended for early adopters and
those wishing to help find and/or fix bugs. This will likely be the
only Release Candidate before the final release of 5.3. The schedule
can be found at http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/schedule.html. Be
sure to check the "Known Issues" below as there are known problems that
are still being worked on at this time.

IMPORTANT:
BIND 9.3.0 has replaced BIND 8.x as the default name server.

IMPORTANT:
Several libraries have had their version numbers bumped in order to
maintain FreeBSD 4.x compatibility. Any programs that rely on these
libraries should be rebuilt. The /etc/libmap.conf facility can be
used to help this migration. In particular, libm.so.2 should be
mapped to libm.so.3 while the migration is in progress. The libraries
that changed are:

libm.so.2 -> libm.so.3
libhistory.so.4 -> libhistory.so.5
libopie.so.2 -> libopie.so.3
libpcap.so.2 -> libpcap.so.3
libreadline.so.4 -> libreadline.so.5

Other fixes and enhancements since BETA7:

- Added support for nForce2, nForce3, and ICH3 sound chips
- Fixed LOR in the socket code
- VM_KMEM_SIZE_MAX and VM_KMEM_SIZE_SCALE are now tunables
- Fixed security hole in syscons related to invalid coordinates
- Interface renaming events are now logged
- PFIL_HOOKS are no longer an option and exist by default
- Fixed problem with threads sometimes ignoring signals
- Many fixes to gvinum
- Fix timecounting on sparc64 SMP
- Many fixes to the 4BSD scheduler and infrastructure
- Fix pflogd to handle the pflog module being unloaded
- Fix rare locking bug in sendfile
- Fix locking in the nge driver
- Increase NKPT so that amd64 and i386+PAE can boot with more than
8GB of RAM
- Many fixes to thread support
- Fix breakpoint handing on i386 and amd64 for kernel GDB
- Many fixes for the THR thread library
- Fix IP multicast locking when the stack is running under Giant
- Fix locking in the sis, bfe, and ndis drivers
- Fix possible crash in linux ptrace
- Remove the FreeBSD keyword from all rc.d scripts
- Disable MTU feedback on IPv6 packets to fix NFS over IPv6 problems
- Many ATA driver fixes
- Many VM fixes for i386 and amd64
- Fix 2.88MB floppy support
- Fix locking in bpf, pfil, and IPv6 routing
- Fix the isp driver to work with i386+PAE
- Fix locking that sometimes resulted in deadlock in the TCP code
- Fix jumbo frame handling for the re driver
- Fix the msdos filesystem code to not panic on corrupt filesystems.
- Fix compiling the NDIS module into the kernel
- Fix permission handling on multicast sockets for non-root users
- Fix locking for i4b driver
- Fix byteorder problem in the dc driver on big-endian machines
- Many gstipe/gmirror/graid fixes
- Correctly set BIOS packet mode in the i386 bootblocks
- Update the em driver to support the PRO/1000 GT card, plus many bug
fixes including the common 'wedge on heavy transmit' problem.
- Fix locking in the dc driver, add ALTQ support
- Fix stability problems with UMA
- Fix a potential panic in ethernet entropy harvesting

Known issues in this release:
- Panic in sodealloc() under heavy load. A fix is being tested now.
- Poor performance of the de and re drivers. Fixes are being tested
now.

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: will be available shortly
amd64: all images available
i386: all images available
ia64: all images available
pc98: miniinst available
sparc64: all images available

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

MD5 (5.3-RC1-amd64-bootonly.iso) = a3955df1c4b168b30a1a17c04c3fc5d8
MD5 (5.3-RC1-amd64-disc2.iso) = 2777e3a6451d14c29ee936cfd9bd4b43
MD5 (5.3-RC1-amd64-miniinst.iso) = 3fc1dbf1319f94b24aa3aabcd980a097
MD5 (5.3-RC1-amd64-disc1.iso) = 393ee3ef7a3dde13a2dd88ffef792e42

MD5 (5.3-RC1-i386-bootonly.iso) = 3e493c494e14b97816229f595e5c271d
MD5 (5.3-RC1-i386-disc2.iso) = a6cca3b873382739f449b721b1e9506d
MD5 (5.3-RC1-i386-miniinst.iso) = b1035ec5102624f499dc81dc964a73b1
MD5 (5.3-RC1-i386-disc1.iso) = 27746b48459f76414f1730ede5fafa28

MD5 (5.3-RC1-ia64-bootonly.iso) = 8ef8b734d3953b15585002d01e875ff7
MD5 (5.3-RC1-ia64-disc1.iso) = dcaa386cfbe160518fd6ba7a5921303a
MD5 (5.3-RC1-ia64-disc2.iso) = 444103efe5fcc435e734b626d6865219
MD5 (5.3-RC1-ia64-miniinst.iso) = 69e9203505c01d53cf5ecb9ba77c351f

MD5 (5.3-RC1-pc98-disc2.iso) = 3e5deebd2a373c03474f1781e0ab8837
MD5 (5.3-RC1-pc98-miniinst.iso) = 343d1ae111672eecb9545ffdc8a17795

MD5 (5.3-RC1-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = 3c7b5dbfccf95f48e1aa32b07c8c498c
MD5 (5.3-RC1-sparc64-disc1.iso) = a1ec5b9157bd6dba88de3cadd1f93f98
MD5 (5.3-RC1-sparc64-disc2.iso) = e0d51a59d9d1736c8e77ec98795a1009
MD5 (5.3-RC1-sparc64-miniinst.iso) = b797cbd788c4d29723c6f08c608d81e5