FreeBSD 5.3-BETA4 Available

BrunoC writes "Once again, the FreeBSD Project presents yet another beta release of FreeBSD 5.3. FreeBSD 5.3 BETA 4 features major bugfixes for ATA, 4BSD is now the default scheduler and overall stability has greatly improved. BETA 5 should hit the streets next week and should be the last BETA and a Release Candidate is scheduled too. 5.3 should be around by October 3rd. ISO images are available for those who want to help the testing process." (Use a mirror.)

Comments

Re:Scheduler?

[anholt]

Part of it was that there were problems with ULE and PREEMPTION, which we really hope to have working for the release if possible. But it was also not performing well for some specific tests that are being done (supersmack on mysql, among others). That combined with a few little bugs (load avg reporting) and the author not really being available to work on it, meant that it was decided to move back to 4BSD for the release (and possibly -STABLE), while hopefully getting ULE going well on -CURRENT. ULE has its own set of features -- better interactivity on heavily loaded machines (so nice for your desktop while compiling!) and, as I remember, better algorithms for machines with tons of processes, but its youth menas it's not well-tuned yet for general server use, which is what FreeBSD focuses on.

Re:Scheduler?

[drmerope]

The author of ULE has been out of touch now for sometime. ULE had known issues at the time it was made default in -current, but it was hoped that visibility would generate the reports necessary to stablize it. Unfortunately, Jeff hasn't seemed to have the time to fix or even examine the issues uncovered.

The recent preemption changes drove ULE from being merely suboptimal (inefficient) in some situations to being unstable.

I've been happy with Beta3

[Moloch666]

I switched over my 5.2.1 personal server to 5.3-Beta3. Mostly for the NDIS driver so I can get my atheros wireless card to work in turbo mode. It runs great. Their ath drivers are much more mature than linux's madwifi they still can't do turbo, all though the man file said otherwise. I'm guessing it's an issue with my card(DWL-G520). I now have my 2 linux computers and this one using windows drivers using ndis wrappers. My wireless speeds are now up to acceptable.

I suppose I'll give this one ago, although by the time I get around to it, I'll probably be cvs up'ing beta5.