FreeBSD 6.1-BETA2/FreeBSD 5.5-BETA2 Available

[Scott Long]

Announcement
------------

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the
availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA4 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA4.  Both FreeBSD
6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 are meant to be a refinement of their  respective
branches with few dramatic changes.  A lot of bugfixes have been made,
some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for
better performance, etc. but no large changes have been made to the
basic architecture.  The FreeBSD 5.5 Release is being done for people
who are unable to make the jump to FreeBSD 6.X at this time.  We do
encourage people to make that transition as soon as possible, though.
There have been some updates made between FreeBSD 5.4 and FreeBSD 5.5
but not all of the bugfixes done to RELENG_6 have been backported to
RELENG_5.  This will almost certainly be the last 5.X release.

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 for 6.1
and RELENG_5 for 5.5, though that will change later in the release cycle
when we start doing the Release Candidates.  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/6.1R/todo.html
	http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.5R/todo.html

Known Issues
------------

A couple of significant changes were made to 6.1-BETA4.  First is a
large set of fixes to the VFS layer and various filesystems that
should sigficantly help performance under heavy load and also fix
problems with forcefully unmounting these filesystems.  While these
changes have recieved considerable developer testing, users are
requested to test filesystem stability as much as possible to ensure
that there are no regressions.

The second large change is that sysinstall will now install both the
GENERIC and SMP kernels and automatically select the appropriate one
based on whether it detects one CPU in the system or multiple CPUs.
However, single CPU systems with hyperthreading will still be treated
as uni-processor by sysinstall.  The automatic selection can be
overridden within sysinstall.  Testing of this is requested to help
identify systems that are not detected correctly.

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

The BETA4 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 (5.5-BETA4-pc98-disc1.iso) = bf6cf1238c000a01fe8c34ed4554e66e
MD5 (5.5-BETA4-alpha-bootonly.iso) = 84e55974d8854692a85d43558e10c658
MD5 (5.5-BETA4-alpha-disc1.iso) = b5fc0a01dc6cb96924c7cd9c18af6dd9
MD5 (5.5-BETA4-i386-bootonly.iso) = e54261162e775b692138597ae2512bf6
MD5 (5.5-BETA4-i386-disc1.iso) = 15f3161d4c5f996bbbc9b28682198dde
MD5 (5.5-BETA4-i386-disc2.iso) = 10c4c7985eea736862480b0212e60155
MD5 (5.5-BETA4-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 371522c9ab80e7d5c0fadd71d670543e
MD5 (5.5-BETA4-amd64-disc1.iso) = 4811510b11620f8706f51e4e0154b8b1
MD5 (5.5-BETA4-amd64-disc2.iso) = 54ee8ec3240de9d84576f1f0cbf2048a

MD5 (6.1-BETA4-pc98-disc1.iso) = ee891f12ddb7b62b2c1d3672555ceb3b
MD5 (6.1-BETA4-ia64-bootonly.iso) = b05da331e737c6c614acbb924584199e
MD5 (6.1-BETA4-ia64-disc1.iso) = d0b09231c1d55308fb8fb45eec845284
MD5 (6.1-BETA4-ia64-livefs.iso) = 9db26824bb09ee98e33ecead0000b643
MD5 (6.1-BETA4-alpha-bootonly.iso) = c77a7d80803efeba3b8140072ccd4969
MD5 (6.1-BETA4-alpha-disc1.iso) = b2701eb2931dd815b3b595f9183ae5a4
MD5 (6.1-BETA4-i386-bootonly.iso) = 113f1b990d298aa8b7f81d93a3636dc3
MD5 (6.1-BETA4-i386-disc1.iso) = aee3a4416eec24b1795346efeb624416
MD5 (6.1-BETA4-i386-disc2.iso) = 01b01719f7a06d2613a3e9fe15417b3f
MD5 (6.1-BETA4-amd64-bootonly.iso) = c52a2081931d89cbbebf50f198e8b169
MD5 (6.1-BETA4-amd64-disc1.iso) = 5624a6ba41abdc60802d21be9ab4cf6e
MD5 (6.1-BETA4-amd64-disc2.iso) = db427ec7ab4af75a8224a890c476846d

The SHA256s are:

SHA256 (5.5-BETA4-pc98-disc1.iso) = 
0574c7db49a81c77d1d9cded1add28451026fee5ca52605be03ab6660f9b5ab5
SHA256 (5.5-BETA4-i386-bootonly.iso) = 
077a4b6561311af08d9f760d734fc822d2589554f4a25ac413cfeb275a59361c
SHA256 (5.5-BETA4-i386-disc1.iso) = 
3367499f48d7fdc526a1f447f8e83ee4eef7a76e74784eb7471124499440e05d
SHA256 (5.5-BETA4-i386-disc2.iso) = 
40751884348826807f6c24ec78d424568be21c3e64fcb002f7cfd2bf9ec3bfa7
SHA256 (5.5-BETA4-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 
ca7390623cfa64589a4f19c80fa557e8a6085c54335811010c6b609a4202fd20
SHA256 (5.5-BETA4-amd64-disc1.iso) = 
a9cba0901cf6747193e173eb1c1d1b843ddaa59d12f2e8e84d0d634d2aba5bb0
SHA256 (5.5-BETA4-amd64-disc2.iso) = 
763d5dfe8d7bed4dadc8850e04e2ad04b8c3f4ae6e283df6cfdd25b9475a80d0

SHA256 (6.1-BETA4-pc98-disc1.iso) = 
3de12c8ec0d65a651bcb200049c5fa7b4a9228ebea6f64dea15b35ab07d19178
SHA256 (6.1-BETA4-ia64-bootonly.iso) = 
430681fcf11c258c0161bd1b79b19a7131252aaf033f2cfcc6f5f3053a2aa255
SHA256 (6.1-BETA4-ia64-disc1.iso) = 
0f91037340f11c64db68613d154d046470f0ec3e6daef125e6c923d172fb9608
SHA256 (6.1-BETA4-ia64-livefs.iso) = 
6ff4ad8ef9e1d8b18a0352c5d400887e44ef75b856f91aa5760cb8c0fd026df7
SHA256 (6.1-BETA4-i386-bootonly.iso) = 
5b1173e91459c1613cdbac3e400802f0755c880b13571a8441941d027c1ee5d6
SHA256 (6.1-BETA4-i386-disc1.iso) = 
fad4d1811061c45ed3cde22d40893e02256df518234c57671be06dddeb532d37
SHA256 (6.1-BETA4-i386-disc2.iso) = 
1a68984b90a222893001cd3bcfeb4a20bf9effb497055d236f830fac655ff63e
SHA256 (6.1-BETA4-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 
e76e9594a2a76e73dfc50d79576d37347b1c18c3b301567a1953946a66caced7
SHA256 (6.1-BETA4-amd64-disc1.iso) = 
a8bf30ed9d8c8d3a62702d8e7b0bc9436a2bf21ea13944ae46cab839ed38bac7
SHA256 (6.1-BETA4-amd64-disc2.iso) = 
23259557817b4f52a3c0000698976c3be38c34d370d64b478c67e00a241c9304