FreeBSD 5.3 Beta1

Tezkah writes "From the announcement: 'The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA1. This is the first BETA of the 5.3 release cycle. It is intended for early adopters and those wishing to help find and/or fix bugs. The 5.3 release cycle will continue with weekly BETA builds while bugs are being fixed and features finalized. The schedule is at www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/schedule.html . Be sure to check the "Known issues" below, there are known problems still being worked on at this time.' New features include fully threaded and multi-processor safe network stack, X.org instead of XFree86, many ACPI enhancements, GCC updated to 3.4.2, gdb updated to 6.1.1, binutils updated, and much more. Expect 5.3 to be released in full on October 3rd, if everything goes according to schedule!"

Comments

Upgrading from 5.2.1 to 5.3-BETA1 a little bumpy

[beholder77]

For those of you running 5.2.1 and planning on doing a source upgrade, make sure you check the /usr/src/etc/group and /usr/src/etc/master.passwd files and add the new groups and users into your own, otherwise your buildworld will fail about half way through.

As well, you can't build a new kernel until the userland is upgraded, the "config" program and kernel options have been upgraded.

Otherwise, the upgrade went well, and it does seem faster than the previous releases.

Re:Upgrading from 5.2.1 to 5.3-BETA1 a little bump

[the real darkskye]

or you could use mergemaster -p before the buildworld.

-p Pre-buildworld mode. Compares only files known to be essential to the success of {build|install}world, including /etc/make.conf

source http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=mergemast er&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+5.2-RELEASE +and+Ports&format=html

Looks like there's still a lot to do.

[Agent Green]

Based on their todo list, it looks like there's still a lot that needs to be done before 5.3 is even close to out-the-door.

Re:Looks like there's still a lot to do.

[jaredmauch]

Yeah, there is still a lot to be done. I think they're going to miss the release date somewhat but the wins that will be seen by 5.3 will be excellent for the FreeBSD release.

The finer grained locking in the subsystems, and all the great work being done by Robert Watson in the NetPerf area is showing up in the stock kernel. I did a half-upgrade (upgrading select packages) to get the 5.3-beta1 kernel to compile on one of my development hosts, and have begun disabling the Giant lock where it's not really needed. This will mean improved disk and network I/O to anyone that has a HTT or SMP system.

FreeBSD has been lagging somewhat in the threads/smp area for some time, and this is helping bring the kernel closer in line to the performance that is seen by other OSes. I'm very exicted and will be looking forward to upgrading my 4.10-REL host to 5.3 as it will do a lot better job with my hardware (2x2.8Xeon 4g dram, em ether, asr0 scsi) and hopefully help solve some of my database performance issues.

Re:Supported hardware list?

[Coneasfast]

I'd be happy to switch to FreeBSD 5.3 as soon as my Conceptronic 54g Wireless PCI Card is supported :)

freebsd has support for windows driver via ndis (aka project evil) if native ones are unavailable

just read up on 'ndis' and 'ndiscvt' man pages

Re:Upgrading from 5.2.1 to 5.3-BETA1 a little bump

[drmerope]

You should only need to run mergemaster -p before the installworld stage (despite the description of the option in mergemaster). Doing a buildworld should not require any special users or groups.

The official procedure (from /usr/src/UPDATING) is:
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE
make installkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE

mergemaster -p
make installworld
mergemaster

Re:Minimal Install Size?

[Brandybuck]

I've never checked what final size I get with an initial install, as I usually go install lot of stuff on top of it immediately afterwards. But I can give you some hints. I don't know if these will work for you are not, but give it a shot.

Don't install the source code if you don't need it, or remove it afterwards if you do. Don't include Linux compatibility. Don't install games, profiled libraries, pre-catted man pages. The 3.x and 4.x compat libs are pretty small, but leave them out anyway if you don't need them.

Don't install the X.org/XFree86 metapackage but use the individual component packages instead, so you won't be sucking down a lot of stuff you won't need, like docs and cyrillic fonts.