freebsd announce - Jun 1995 - Ok, *now* it's End-Of-ALPHA Release Candidate time!

Hey folks,


OK, so maybe you heard me say this a few days ago too, but that was
before I spent 4 solid days and nights beating on the thing! :-)

What is now on ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.0.5-ALPHA and
ftp://freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.0.5-ALPHA is pretty much 2.0.5-BETA in
all but name.

I suppose a few words on our current status are also in order,
provided that I can manage to form any coherent thoughts at the
moment, that is (boy, am I _tired!_)..

I'm going to re-roll 2.0.5A tonite/this morning and release it as
2.0.5B later in the day, the only real difference being the version
string.  The tree will NOT be tagged for BETA!  You CVS sup'ers can
breathe again now.. :-)

This is also basically it for sysinstall and 2.0.5R.  I'm done and I
do not plan to write any additional docs or implement any new
functionality.  Finito!

I will, of course, fix any sufficiently severe last-minute bugs in
code or doc, but this part of the tree is now essentially frozen with
the rest of 2.0.5B.

At this point, all known problems with the installation have been
fixed or documented.  I know it's still not perfect, but it works
quite a bit better than the last one in enough significant ways and
it's good enough for me (for now).

We do have a few reports of systems falling over with strange
cache-related problems, and which David and Poul are looking into.
Some other posters reported random Sig-11s, but it is unclear as to
whether or not this might have been caused by the "truncated bindist
problem" we suffered from for a short time during the ALPHA.  The
keyboard lock-ups seem to have gone away with the temporary disabling
(sorry, Joerg!) of the serial console code.


It's also important to note that there are several new pieces of
technology at work in this installation process; techniques which will
most likely not directly affect you but are nevertheless worth knowing
about.

The First trick is "kzip", or the compressed (gzip'd) kernel
image.
Those familiar with Linux already know all about compressing kernels
to save space on boot floppies, and we're doing it now too.  A kzip'd
kernel has a small bootstrap which loads it at 3MB and expands it.
This is why 4MB machines briefly stopped working a few days back; we'd
allowed the kernel to get larger than 1MB, and naturally there wasn't
much room left up there! :-) Needless to say, this trick is only good
for medium sized kernels..

The second trick is "kernmfs", which is a kernel that contains a large
pre-allocated array inside and into which a second utility has copied
a small root filesystem.  This means that the kernel is now
essentially carrying its own root filesystem around with it and is
entirely self-contained, given some memory to run in.

When this kernel is booted it creates an MFS (Memory File System) that
overlays the internal "filesystem", and presto!  A kernel and
filesystem all running in memory and without any dependencies on
things like the floppy drive, which might actually want to get used
for something like loading distributions later.  It doesn't matter if
the kernmfs image _booted_ from a floppy, once it's up all the way
then it's running from memory and no longer interested in where it
came from (except as media).

Though this solves a lot of problems inherent in the old scheme (some
of which were basically impossible to solve before), it is not without
its potential quirks..  We're using some new tools here, and while
they may work just fine with all the equipment we have lying around
it's always possible that there's some combination of hardware out
there which we just haven't taken into account.  In such cases, your
feedback is invaluable in determining whether or not a fix is merited
or possible.  If you see any unusual behavior while booting the boot
floppy, please write it down and let us know!

This installation set now fully supports the following installation
media types:

	CDROM
	Floppy
	DOS
	FTP
	NFS
	TAPE

I've tested all of them and they seem to work quite well.  The
occasional crash is still possible, but you have to do something
pretty creative or be having a really bad day on the Internet (this
assumes you're not loading from CD, which is quite a bit simpler to
deal with).

The distribution menus have also been revamped and are now quite a bit
more usable.

If you haven't yet jumped on the 2.0.5 testing bandwagon then I
strongly urge you to do so while there's still time to make a
difference!  I've no interest in pushing out a low-quality 2.0.5R
release that embarasses us all, but at the same time I can't hold the
CD up forever and I'm working on it in parallel now.  Ideally, I'd
like to hear from as many new installations as possible in the next
day or so and thus be able to do a rough head-count of "it worked!"
and "it didn't work!" messages so that I can gauge overall
stability.
I can say that 2.0.5 works very well for wcarchive, my machine,
David's machine, Poul's machine, Gary's machine, etc. - many
machines,
I just need to know right now how well it works on *your* machine! :-)

So please, download the floppies/boot.flp file today and test it on
something!  If you're doing anything but a tape or floppy installation
then you don't even need to grab the "root.flp" image and the
installation will get it automatically.

Do please also try to read through all the documentation before filing
a bug report.  The documentation files are now available both inside
and outside the boot floppy and are easily accessible from your local
FTP mirror site.  Most installation problems generally fall into a few
known categories which, believe it or not, are documented in the
Hardware guide and the Disk selection screen this time.  Don't be
afraid to type "F1" and read everything you see! :-)

I know that some of you have felt more than a little rushed by the
hectic 2.0.5A schedule and for that I apologise.  What can I say?  We
were late.. :-(

For an ALPHA cycle as short as this one, however, I do have to say
that we have made some amazingly rapid progress!  Perhaps giving up on
all that wasteful sleep did the trick.. :-)

I don't know how long I can prolong the BETA (a few days, maybe
less?), but I'll try to make up for the severe time constraints by
being as responsive as humanly possible during the interval.  If you
have real problems with the installation then I *will* try to get back
to you within the hour with some sort of response to any question you
send me!

If you're really stumped, my phone numbers are in my finger entry on
freefall (finger jkh@freefall.cdrom.com).

I REALLY WANT TO HEAR YOUR FEEDBACK!  If it works, let me know!  If it
doesn't work, also let me know!  I need some feeling for our success
rate on installations and this is the only way to get it.

Thanks, everyone!  And thanks for putting up with my
new-floppies-every-20-minutes work model during the ALPHA and an
installation I basically had to write from scratch.  I suppose this is
called "rapid prototyping" in the industry (or perhaps just another
way of saying "I didn't really know where I wanted to go when I
started, so I just started running." :-)

					Jordan