HEADS UP: Status of the 5.2 release

[Scott Long]

All,

As I mentioned yesterday, we have a serious show-stopper for the 5.2
release.  Jeff Roberson and Doug White did some good diagnosis work a
few nights ago, but we are still without a fix.  We cannot cut 5.2 until
this gets resolved.  I know that this is the end of the year and
everyone has deadlines, family, travel, etc, but we really need some
more eyes on this.  To recap, a panic happens from sysinstall while
unpacking the bin distribution.  It is most readily created by enabling
SoftUpdates on the root partition, but there are reports that SU is not
a required factor.  The panic originates in the fsync codepath and
ends with a corrupt mutex.  This is discussed on the freebsd-current@
mailing under the subject of "HAVE TRACE & DDB Re: FreeBSD 5.2-RC1
released".  Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

The Release Engineering Team