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