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<h3>Goals</h3>

<p>As part of our on-going effort to improve the release engineering
  process, we have identified several areas that need significant
  quality assurance testing during the release candidate phase.
  Below, we've listed the changes in 4.6-PRERELEASE that we feel merit
  the most attention due to their involving substantial changes to the
  system, or having arrived late in the development cycle leading up
  to the release.  In general, our goal in the QA process is to
  attempt to check a number of things:</p>

<ul>
  <li>The system has not regressed with respects to stability, correctness,
    interoperability, or performance of features present in prior
    releases.<br><br></li>

  <li>New features result in the desired improvement in stability,
    correctness, interoperability, or performance.</li>
</ul>

<p>To effectively determine this, it's desirable to test the system in
  a diverse set of environments, applying a wide set of workloads,
  forcing the system to operate both within and outside its normal
  specification.  Particular focus should often be placed on the
  continuing (or new) capability of the system to perform correctly
  when used in concert with systems from other vendors.</p>

<h3>Features to explore carefully:</h3>

<ul>

  <li>DHCP client support.  This release will feature a major update
    of the ISC DHCP client (v3.0.1 RC8).  The common cases have been
    well tested, but testing in more demanding or unusual environments
    would be beneficial.  In particular, the new dynamic DNS update
    functionality has not been well tested.</li>

  <li>sppp(4) upgrade.  The ISDN project (i4b) once maintained an
    off-spring version of the SyncPPP driver, with a number of
    enhancements and bug-fixes made to it by people contributing to
    the i4b project.  On the other hand, other improvements and
    bug-fixes of the regular tree's sppp driver didn't make it back
    to that version, so eventually two different SyncPPP drivers
    developed.  The i4b version has been merged back in FreeBSD-current
    a few months ago, and these changes have now been folded into
    FreeBSD-stable as well, thus eliminating i4b's separate version.
    sppp users (of both flavours) should carefully test the new
    version.  Users who previously used the i4b version should find
    all those improvements still being present (most notably, VJ header
    compression).  Users who use sppp on hardware (HDLC) devices (like
    ar(4) or sr(4)) should see no breakage, but might notice that the
    negotiation of VJ header compression is now enabled by default.
    Use spppcontrol(8) to modify the default behaviour.  Please report
    any breakage or oddity you observe to &lt;joerg@FreeBSD.org&gt;.</li>

  <li>XFree86 4.2.0.  sysinstall now installs XFree86 4.2.0 instead of
    XFree86 3.3.6; the XFree86 installation now uses ``normal'' binary
    packages instead of the special tarballs in past releases.  The
    ports infrastructure now uses the XFree86 version 4 as the default
    version for satisfying dependencies.</li>

</ul>

<p>The <a href="../../relnotes.html">release notes</a> will always be
  a good place to look for things to test.</p>

<h3>Known Issues</h3>

<ul>
  <li>Due to a buffer truncation in sysinstall, the GNOME meta-port
    (<tt>x11/gnome</tt>) in
    4.6-RC1 does not install correctly.  This has been fixed and is
    functional for 4.6-RC2 (and any later release candidate snapshots).</li>

  <li>nslookup(1) had some bugs in 4.6-RC1 and 4.6-RC2.  These have
    been been corrected and should function correctly beginning with
    4.6-RC3.</li>

  <li>Some users have reported stability issues with tagged queueing
    and the ata(4) driver.  These problems have only been observed
    when using tags on motherboard-based ATA channels.</li>

  <li>Potential problems with the TCP default window size (see
    kern/34801).  The default window size has been reduced from 65536
    to 57344 for 4.6-RELEASE.  (Errata item needed.)</li>

  <li>Some of the XFree86 configuration utilities write their
    generated configuration files in places where sysinstall isn't
    looking for them, thus complicating XFree86 installs that are
    initiated from within sysinstall.  These have been changed to
    /etc/X11/XF86Config for 4.6-RELEASE.  (Errata item needed.)</li>

  <li>Some filenames in the ports tree are too long, thus resulting in
    odd /usr/@LongLink files after a sysinstall.  These filenames have
    been shortened for 4.6-RELEASE.</li>

  <li>Under some circumstances, dhclient can go into an infinite loop.</li>
</ul>

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