4.5-RELEASE is now available

[Murray Stokely]

  I am very pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD
4.5-RELEASE, the very latest release on the FreeBSD -STABLE branch of
development.  Since FreeBSD 4.4 was released in September 2001, we
have made hundreds of fixes, updated many system components, made
several substantial performance improvements, and addressed a wide
variety of security issues.

  In particular, there have been significant enhancements in the areas
of network communications and filesystems.  FreeBSD 4.5 contains
improvements to the TCP stack to provide better throughput.  In
addition, TCP performance is aided by larger default buffer sizes.
Finally, FreeBSD 4.5 contains new mechanisms to mitigate the effects
of TCP Denial of Service attacks.

  The FFS filesystem benefits from a new directory layout strategy
that has demonstrated significantly better performance for operations
traversing large directory structures.  Various bugs were located and
fixed in the FFS and NFS code with the help of a filesystem exercising
program originally developed at Apple Computer, Inc.

  Those users doing fresh installations of FreeBSD should note some
changes for newly created filesystems, intended to improve the "out of
the box" performance of FreeBSD.  In particular, sysinstall(8) now
enables Soft Updates (a strategy for improving both performance and
reliability of on-disk data structures) for new filesystems it creates
and the newfs(8) program will now, by default, create filesystems with
larger block sizes.

  For more information about the most significant changes with this
release of FreeBSD, please see the release notes :

   http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.5R/notes.html


Availability
------------

4.5-RELEASE is available for the i386 and alpha architectures and can
be installed directly over the net using the boot floppies or copied
to a local NFS/FTP server.

We can't promise that all the mirror sites will carry the larger ISO
images, but they will at least be available from:

  ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
  http://ftp.au.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ 
  ftp://ftp.dk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
  ftp://freebsd.nctu.edu.tw/pub/FreeBSD/

If you can't afford the CDs, are impatient, or just want to use it for
evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISOs, otherwise
please continue to support the FreeBSD project by purchasing media
from one of our supporting vendors.  The following companies have
contributed substantially to the development of FreeBSD :

   FreeBSD Mall, Inc.      http://www.freebsdmall.com
   FreeBSD Services Ltd.   http://www.freebsd-services.com
   Daemon News             http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html

Each CD set contains the FreeBSD installation and application package
bits for the i386 ("PC") architecture.  For a set of distfiles used to
build ports in the ports collection, please see the FreeBSD Toolkit, a
6 CD set containing extra bits which no longer fit on the 4 CD set.

FreeBSD is also available via anonymous FTP from mirror sites in the
following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada,
China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany,
Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania,
Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi
Arabia, South Africa, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden,
Taiwan, Thailand, the Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Before trying the central FTP site, please check your regional
mirror(s) first by going to:

ftp://ftp.<yourdomain>.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD

Any additional mirror sites will be labeled ftp2, ftp3 and so on.

See http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html for additional
information about FreeBSD mirror sites.

The FreeBSD installation instructions have recently been significantly
enhanced.  Chapter 2 of The FreeBSD Handbook, available online at
http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/install.html, provides a complete
installation walk-through for users new to FreeBSD.


Acknowledgments
----------------

Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to
finance the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 4.5, including
Compaq, Yahoo!, and The FreeBSD Mall.

In addition to myself, the release engineering team for 4.5-RELEASE
includes:

 Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org> : Release Engineering
 John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>      : Release Engineering
 Bruce A. Mah <bmah at FreeBSD.org>     : Release Documentation
 Steve Price <steve at FreeBSD.org>     : Package Building
 Wilko Bulte <wilko at FreeBSD.org>     : Alpha Platform Release Engineering
 Peter Wemm <peter at FreeBSD.org>      : Ports Cluster System Administrator

Please join me in thanking them for all the hard work which went into
making this release. I would also like to thank the FreeBSD Committers
<committers at FreeBSD.org>, without whom there would be nothing to
release, and the many thousands of FreeBSD users world-wide who
contributed bug fixes, features and suggestions.

  Thanks!
   - Murray
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