FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1 Available

Fri Jul 15 14:58:28 GMT 2005

And, for "the stupid question of the day" ... how long before 5.x is no 
longer supported?  I'm just about to deploy a new server, and was *going* 
to go with 5.x, but would I be better just skipping 5.x altogether?  Or 
are there such drastic changes in 6.x that doing so at this time wouldn't 
be prudent?

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, Scott Long wrote:

> 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).
>
>

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy at hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664