Announcement
------------
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the
availability of FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1, which marks the beginning of the
FreeBSD 6.0 Release Cycle.
FreeBSD 6.0 will be a much less dramatic step from the FreeBSD 5
branch than the FreeBSD 5 branch was from FreeBSD 4. Much of the
work
that has gone into 6.0 development has focused on polishing and
improving the work from 5.x These changes include streamlining
direct
device access in the kernel, providing a multi-threaded SMP-safe
UFS/VFS filesystem layer, implementing WPA and Host-AP 802.11
features, as well as countless bugfixes and device driver
improvements. Major updates and improvements have been made to ACPI
power and thermal management, ATA, and many aspects of the network
infrastructure. 32bit application support for AMD64 is also greatly
improved, as is compatiblity with certain Athlon64 motherboards.
This
release is also the first to feature experimental PowerPC support
for
the Macintosh G3 and G4 platforms.
This BETA1 release is in the same basic format as the Monthly
Snapshots. For most of the architectures only the ISO images are
available though the FTP install tree is available for a couple
of the
architectures.
We encourage people to help with testing so any final bugs can be
identified and worked out. Availability of ISO images 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_6
(though that will change for the Release Candidates later). Problem
reports can be submitted using the send-pr(1) command.
The list of open issues and things still being worked on are on the
todo list:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/todo.html
Since this is the first release of a new branch we only have a rough
idea for some of the dates. The current rough schedule is available
but most dates are still listed as "TBD - To Be Determined":
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/schedule.html
Known Issues
------------
For the PowerPC architecture /etc/fstab isn't written out
properly, so
the first boot throws you into the mountroot> prompt. You will need
to manually enter where the root partition is and fix /etc/fstab.
Also the GEM driver is listed as 'unknown' in the network config
dialog.
For all architectures a kernel rebuild might be needed to get some
FreeBSD 5 applications to run. Add "options COMPAT_FREEBSD5" to the
kernel configuration file if you have problems with FreeBSD 5
executables.
Availability
------------
The BETA1 ISOs and FTP support are available 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 are:
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-alpha-bootonly.iso) =
eabda0a086e5492fe43626ce5be1d7e1
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-alpha-disc1.iso) = d7fe900bb3d5f259cc3cc565c4f303e4
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-amd64-bootonly.iso) =
9b04cb2f68300071c717f4aa4220bdac
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-amd64-disc1.iso) = cb0f21feaf8b7dd9621f82a8157f6ed8
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-amd64-disc2.iso) = 84d40bc291a9ed5cd69dfa717445eeb5
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-i386-bootonly.iso) = 38e0b202ee7d279bae002b883f7074ec
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-i386-disc1.iso) = b2baa8c18d4637ef02822a0da6717408
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-i386-disc2.iso) = 2b151a3cea8843d322c75ff76779ffcf
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-ia64-bootonly.iso) = 97800ec7d4b29927a8e66a2b53e987fb
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-ia64-disc1.iso) = 7d29cd9317997136507078971762a0d8
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-ia64-livefs.iso) = 6ff974e60a3964cf16fcec05925c14e9
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-pc98-disc1.iso) = 40a3134cce89bd5f7033d8b9181edf91
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-powerpc-bootonly.iso) =
2f64974e9bd5adcf813f5d35ff742443 MD5 (6.0-BETA1-powerpc-disc1.iso) =
b2562c38414ff4866f5ed8b3a38683c8
MD5 (6.0-BETA1-sparc64-bootonly.iso) =
ae9610aeb1169d2cc649628606014441 MD5 (6.0-BETA1-sparc64-disc1.iso) =
af21752630b13cf60c9498fbf7f793b6 MD5 (6.0-BETA1-sparc64-disc2.iso) =
3241af814bfe93a97707c7a964c57718
Thanks to Ken Smith, Marcel Moolenaar, Wilko Bulte, and Takahashi
Yoshihiro, and Peter Grehan for doing the sparc64, ia64, alpha,
pc98,
and ppc builds, respectively. Thanks also to Ken Smith for his help
on writing much of this announcement.
--
This mail is for the internal use of the FreeBSD project committers,
and as such is private. This mail may not be published or forwarded
outside the FreeBSD committers' group or disclosed to other
unauthorised parties without the explicit permission of the author
(s).
