Download FreeBSD 5.4 RC2

The members of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team have made a second release candidate of FreeBSD 5.4 available through the mailing list. The operating system has a long history from FreeBSD 1.0 from December 1993 which has evolved over the years into what it is today. The developers provide at least the following release notes:

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.4-RC2, the second Release Candidate of the FreeBSD 5.4 release cycle.

We encourage people to help with testing so any final bugs can be identified and worked out. At this point the only major problem has been reports of large server (4 processors or more) hanging under extreme load conditions (varied load of local processes like database and heavy network load). Details to help with debugging have been hard to obtain so if anyone is in a position to help with trying to reproduce this it would be appreciated.

Availability of ISO images and support for doing FTP based installs 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_5_4. Problem reports can be submitted using the send-pr(1) command, and/or posted to the “freebsd-stable at freebsd.org” mailing list.

A schedule and the current todo list for the 5.4 Release Cycle are available:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/schedule.html
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/todo.html

The packages being provided as part of RC2 are what is expected to come with the final release for the amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. Packages for alpha and ia64 are still being worked on.