· The first of two planned release candidates for the FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE cycle is now available. Testing of some of the recent work would be particularly appreciated. This includes: bce(4) updated (there is a report that lagg(4) does not work after the update, fixing that may need to be done as an errata notice after the release); testing of the threading libraries; amr(4) should be fixed. A fix for the 'vm_page_insert: page already inserted' panics has been committed to RELENG_7_1 this morning so it missed the 7.2-RC1 builds. If you wind up being hit by that you can try a normal source based update to the current state of RELENG_7_1 and that problem should go away.
· Testing of two recent changes to the system would be particularly valuable. The bce(4) network driver was updated a few days ago. And some significant work was done on the threading libraries a short time ago that is known to fix several major issues but testing to see if it introduced any regressions would be appreciated.
· FreeBSD 7.1-RC1 is now available, the first of the release candidates. There will be at least one more release candidate before the release so the release itself is likely around three weeks from now - if no new show-stoppers are uncovered during testing. In addition to general testing, we're looking for information about potential problems with the boot loader. And a late arrival that's not possible to test without the packages, sysinstall's issues with excessive disc swapping when installing large sets of packages off the CDROMs should be fixed. Testing to make sure that's working would be appreciated.
· As the next step in the release cycle for FreeBSD 7.1 builds for FreeBSD 7.1-BETA2 are now available for testing. The ISO images and FTP install trees are available on the FreeBSD mirror sites. The amd64 and i386 sets include a preliminary set of packages, not what is expected to be included with the release itself. The biggest change is that kde-lite was used this time, while the full kde3 will most likely be used for the release. If you would like to do a source-based update to 7.1-BETA2 from an already installed machine you can update your tree to RELENG_7 using normal cvsup/csup methods. The freebsd-update utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases.
