FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1 Available

ailantian

http://www.freebsd.org/news/newsflash.html#event20050715:01

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 ... ok/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.