Announcement ------------ The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.4-RC2, the second Release Candidate of the FreeBSD 5.4 release cycle. We encourage people to help with testing so any final bugs can be identified and worked out. At this point the only major problem has been reports of large server (4 processors or more) hanging under extreme load conditions (varied load of local processes like database and heavy network load). Details to help with debugging have been hard to obtain so if anyone is in a position to help with trying to reproduce this it would be appreciated. Availability of ISO images and support for doing FTP based installs is given below. If you have an older system you want to update using the normal CVS/cvsup source based upgrade the branch tag to use is RELENG_5_4. Problem reports can be submitted using the send-pr(1) command, and/or posted to the "freebsd-stable@freebsd.org" mailing list. A schedule and the current todo list for the 5.4 Release Cycle are available: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/schedule.html http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/todo.html The packages being provided as part of RC2 are what is expected to come with the final release for the amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. Packages for alpha and ia64 are still being worked on. Availability ------------ The RC2 ISOs and FTP support for all architectures are available now on most of the FreeBSD Mirror sites. A list of the mirror sites is available here: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html The MD5s of the ISO images are: MD5 (5.4-RC2-alpha-bootonly.iso) = 2238c45b5907931d248487cac55f1c5f MD5 (5.4-RC2-alpha-disc1.iso) = 89ecfdb35ea3cd92716686116b664ea5 MD5 (5.4-RC2-alpha-disc2.iso) = 678581d5b6ae049f18491e203ebadd20 MD5 (5.4-RC2-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 50db1883edf34ff15834da03654d79c3 MD5 (5.4-RC2-amd64-disc1.iso) = a18c728f6259847a1538b03815bfc640 MD5 (5.4-RC2-amd64-disc2.iso) = a0686aa29eca455436f7d9cb0164f055 MD5 (5.4-RC2-i386-bootonly.iso) = 66303d342f235870572b8bd882425445 MD5 (5.4-RC2-i386-disc1.iso) = 08b9ae45f5f6873468d03a3915f55de4 MD5 (5.4-RC2-i386-disc2.iso) = 115fd80bfaa54b94ef194d104e7a803f MD5 (5.4-RC2-ia64-bootonly.iso) = 2e459a193e00f499371252ea98291af4 MD5 (5.4-RC2-ia64-disc1.iso) = 31914a284b740c32e8808e7bfaf408c0 MD5 (5.4-RC2-ia64-disc2.iso) = 875b59e9435ca7e79ab36562cf5c1e88 MD5 (5.4-RC2-ia64-livefs.iso) = 0ae9868c11a46e9f7e56f1e4d71f2e7e MD5 (5.4-RC2-pc98-disc1.iso) = 12f527c1ed165101ff36053c29440212 MD5 (5.4-RC2-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = 6f087402361627a1e6c52c134152c52f MD5 (5.4-RC2-sparc64-disc1.iso) = 411916559bd5ebe03f6ae65622b02e5f MD5 (5.4-RC2-sparc64-disc2.iso) = 1300c0abeda2d00bb859adbc8a1d7a9a -ken -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20050411/c5179b4c/attachment.bin
> We encourage people to help with testing so any final bugs can be identified > and worked out. At this point the only major problem has been reports > of large server (4 processors or more) hanging under extreme load conditions > (varied load of local processes like database and heavy network load). > Details to help with debugging have been hard to obtain so if anyone is > in a position to help with trying to reproduce this it would be appreciated.5.4 RC1 is running on our webservers, a combo of dual Xeon's, Noconas and Opterons without any problems. It's also running on our firewall with pf and the performance is quite nice, less than 10 % utilization. I have a NFS-server running 5.3 beta 3 which is accessed by the webservers. The volume is lightly accessed. Next week it will host a new volume which will have a lot of activity, so I'd like to upgrade it to 5.4 RC2 before that (saturday). Looking at the only major problems left, I feel pretty comfortable that RC2 will be very stable. The NFS-server is a Compaq dual PIII at 1 GHz (G2), 3 GB RAM, Smart RAID 5 (ciss), qlogic 2310 hba and an Intel GBIC-card (em). The em-driver is mpsafe and the isp-driver is not, but overall the performance should be better with 5.4 compared to 5.3. Has anyone had the opportunity to compare NFS on 5.3 and 5.4? Should I play it safe and wait until May before I upgrade? regards Claus