So... Two show-stoppers, one Security Advisory, and one "Gee. Did we
really implement that new interface that way? That needs a bit more
work." later...
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 3 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. There has been traffic here
about problems but the reports haven't helped narrow down the causes
yet. So far it seems to be related to USB keyboards and at least so far
systems with more than one processor in them. More data points like
cases where a USB keyboard was not involved as well as if possible
things like which motherboard it is might help us narrow down the cause.
Testing on a variety of motherboards, of varying ages and manufacturers
would help.
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. Given the package
layout it should ask for a disc no more than once. Testing to make sure
that's working would be appreciated.
NOTE: If updating from a 7.0 or earlier system due to a change in the
Vendor's drivers certain Intel NICs will now come up as igb(4) instead
of em(4). We normally try to avoid changes like that in stable branches
but the vendor felt it necessary in order to support the new adapters.
See the UPDATING entry dated 20080811 for details. There are only 3 PCI
ID's that should have their name changed from em(4) to igb(4): 0x10A7,
0x10A9, and 0x10D6. You should be able to determine if your card will
change names by running the command "pciconf -l", and for the line
representing your NIC (should be named em on older systems, e.g. em0 or
em1, etc) check the fourth column. If it says "chip=0x10a7" (or one of
the other two IDs given above) you will have the adapter's name change.
The ISO images and FTP install trees are available on the FreeBSD Mirror
sites. Using the primary site as an example:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/${arch}/ISO-IMAGES/7.1/
where ${arch} is one of amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, powerpc, or sparc64.
The ISOs for amd64, i386, and sparc64 include what is expected to be the
final package set. For all architectures the ISOs with "disc" in their
names are CDROM-sized, if you intend to install a variety of packages
during installation you will need all three. For amd64 and i386 there
is a gzip-ed iso with "dvd" in its name which is DVD-sized. It contains
everything (install bits, livefs, docs, and packages) and can be used if
your machine has a DVD drive in it.
If you would like to do a source-based update to 7.1-RC1 from an already
installed machine you can update your tree to RELENG_7_1 using normal
cvsup/csup methods. Note that due to an unfortunate side-effect of the
"real" source code repository now being in SVN it will look like all
files have a new version so mergemaster may be a bit tedious.
The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64
systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running 7.0-RELEASE,
7.1-BETA, or 7.1-BETA2 can upgrade as follows:
# freebsd-update upgrade -r 7.1-RC1
During this process, FreeBSD Update may ask the user to help by merging
some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed
merging was done correctly.
# freebsd-update install
The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.
# shutdown -r now
After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new
userland components, and the system needs to be rebooted again:
# freebsd-update install
# shutdown -r now
Users of Intel network interfaces which are changing their name from "em" to
"igb" should make necessary changes to configuration files BEFORE running
freebsd-update, since otherwise the network interface will not be configured
appropriately after rebooting for the first time.
Users of earlier FreeBSD releases (FreeBSD 6.x) can also use freebsd-update to
upgrade to FreeBSD 7.1, but will be prompted to rebuild all third-party
applications (e.g., anything installed from the ports tree) after the second
invocation of "freebsd-update install", in order to handle differences in the
system libraries between FreeBSD 6.x and FreeBSD 7.x.
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