1 Known Problems

• Serial GDB is broken.

• LOMAC doesn't protect against a certain class of inter-process activities such as signaling, since the MAC hooks those checks rely on aren't in the base tree yet.

• gcc -O is known to be broken.

• There are two different PCCARD implementations, OLDCARD and NEWCARD. NEWCARD has support for Cardbus, but has PCCARD problems.

• Kernels may have to be built with -DNO_WERROR=yes due to warning handling in the build infrastructure.

• The system documentation indicates that there is support for POSIX.1e capabilities, but the kernel infrastructure is not merged; the documentation and library may be removed before 5.0 depending on strategy decisions not yet made.

• NFS client locking does not interact well with chroot(2) environments; locking only works for processes sharing the same root as the locking daemon.

• Binutils appears to have some problems compiling software from the ports collection (specifically, ld(1) is known to have a problem with multiple references to some symbols).

• The hardware timecounter code has recently been changed. Some systems may emit warning messages to the console such as ``calcru: negative time of -48 usec for pid 155 (csh)''. Please read the FreeBSD-current mailing list <[email protected]> for information about what these messages mean, and how to get rid of them.

• XFree86 4.2.0 was recently made the default version of XFree86 installed by sysinstall(8). By default, X tries to access /dev/mouse during initial configuration, but that should be changed to /dev/sysmouse.

2 Unfinished Features

A number of very significant changes to the system will be made for FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE. These features, and their approximate status, are noted here.

• The lock-pushdown for fine-grained kernel threading is in-process, and not complete in this snapshot. As a result, the full benefits are not yet realized.

• Scheduler activation support exists only in the kernel, not in the userland thread library, and in this snapshot, threads from the same process using KSE can execute on only one processor at a time.

• Mandatory access control support from the TrustedBSD branch is not yet merged.

• UFS2 (essentially, UFS with extended attributes in inodes) is not yet ready for inclusion in the snapshot.

3 Known Pitfalls

• FreeBSD 5.0-DP1 has a number of debugging features enabled. These generally have a negative impact on performance. One notable example is that the user-level malloc(3) functions behave, by default, as though the AJ debugging flags were set. Those benchmarking the system should be sure to run without debugging features enabled.

• Interrupt latency is high due to on-going SMP work, this will be fixed prior to the final release.

• Tighter enforcement of #include file deprecation results in a number of common applications failing to build. In particular, if you #include <malloc.h>, you now get a #error instead of a #warning.

• The kernel is no longer installed as /kernel and /modules, these have moved to /boot/kernel.

• When upgrading a system, make sure to pay attention to the change from an /etc/pam.conf configure file to multiple files in /etc/pam.d/. Likewise, OpenPAM has replaced LinuxPAM, and new PAM modules have been introduced; this may result in warnings from older authentication-related applications compiled under RELENG_4, such as xdm, kdm, and gdm.

• The sendmail startup code in /etc/rc has been changed to support the new requirements of sendmail 8.12. The new setup may cause problems for users running MTAs other than sendmail. You can prevent any sendmail daemons from starting at boot time by adding the following to /etc/rc.conf:

      sendmail_enable="NO"
      sendmail_outbound_enable="NO"
      sendmail_msp_queue_enable="NO"
      sendmail_submit_enable="NO"
  

  Note that 5.0-DP2 (as well as 5.0-RELEASE) will support a sendmail_enable="NONE" setting to disable all sendmail daemons with a single variable. This functionality was not merged to the 5.0-DP1 snapshot.

4 Testing Guide

While testing reports of all aspects of FreeBSD 5.0-DP1 are welcomed, there are several areas which could benefit from some extra testing:

• Basic kernel functionality. The changes for SMPng are still in progress, and have some far-reaching effects throughout many parts of the kernel. Testing the kernel's stability on both UP and SMP machines will help find any regressions that may have come about.

• The PAM infrastructure has undergone significant changes, including a replacement of Linux PAM with OpenPAM.

• FFS snapshots and background fsck(8). The latter feature is enabled by default; a reasonable test for snapshots is to do backups by creating a snapshot using the instructions in src/sys/ufs/ffs/README.snapshot and performing a dump(8) of the snapshot.

• Because of API changes, a number of ports in the FreeBSD Ports Collection are broken under FreeBSD 5-CURRENT. Frequently, there are straightforward fixes for these ports; submitting these fixes will improve the state of buildable ports and packages that can be shipped with FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE.

• NFS has undergone some significant code reorganization, although it is believed to be fairly stable. NFS client locking is a new feature.

• The sparc64 platform support is new, and could use testing on a wider variety of hardware.

• XFree86 4.2.0 was recently made the default version of XFree86 installed by sysinstall(8). Testing with as many different video cards as possible will help determine if this should be merged to the FreeBSD -STABLE branch.