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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 &rel; 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><p>PPP.  A number of significant PPP changes were merged to
    -STABLE before the code freeze.  In particular, the following
    changes were made:</p>
    <ul>
      <li>IPv6 support</li>
      <li>Better RADIUS support (including MS-CHAP)</li>
      <li>Improved handling of bad negotiation options</li>
      <li>Improved negotiation diagnostics</li>
      <li>Improved sockaddr (RTAX) parsing</li>
      <li>More consistent compile time options (NOXXX to compile something out)</li>
      <li>More available macros</li>
      <li>Firewall punching</li>
      <li>Improved ``proxy'' and ``proxyall'' handling</li>
      <li>Handle connected UDP sockets on descriptor 0 in -direct mode</li>
      <li>Fix a load of typos</li>
      <li>Update to internal version 3.1</li>
    </ul>
  </li>

  <li>IPFilter has recently been updated to version 3.4.29 and has not
    yet been thoroughly tested in -STABLE.</li>

  <li><strong>ahc</strong> and <strong>ahd</strong> Adaptec SCSI
    drivers: There has been a major update to the <tt>ahc</tt> and
    <tt>ahd</tt> device drivers.  These drivers have not yet been
    thoroughly tested in -STABLE.</li>

  <li>ATA.  There were some problems with tagged queuing and some
    CDROM read operations with the ATA stack in FreeBSD 4.6.  These
    problems were fixed in 4.6.2, but more testing on different
    hardware is still needed.</li>

  <li>Sendmail has been updated to 8.12.6.  This should be a very
    stable bugfix release, but sendmail users are encouraged to help
    test this before 4.7 is released.</li>

  <li>XFree86 has been updated to 4.2.1.  This release fixes some
    security issues and other bugs in 4.2.0, but should have almost
    identical functionality.</li>

  <li>Heimdal (Kerberos 5 support) has been updated.  Kerberos 5 users
    are encouraged to test this before 4.7 is released.</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>The 4.7-RC1 snapshots were built without packages due to some
    problems (which only recently came to light) in the bzip2 package
    support.  <em>Resolution:</em> The RE team decided to return to
    gzip packages for 4.7-RC2 (as well as any subsequent RC snapshots
    and the final release), thus allowing this snapshot to have its
    normal package set.</li>

  <li>Partially as a result of the above package problems, the ports
    tree on the 4.7-RC1/i386 ISO image is not exactly the same as the
    4.7-RC1/i386 FTP directory.  Both will be eventually updated for
    subsequent RC snapshots and the final release.
    <em>Resolution:</em> Not a factor for subsequent snapshots.</li>

  <li>Loading kernel modules on 4.7-RC1/alpha is broken.
    <em>Resolution:</em> A fix has
    been committed and will be present in 4.7-RC2/alpha.</li>

  <li>When booting from the install media (e.g. a CDROM), sysinstall
    tries to load a set of modules from the mfsroot image.  For some
    reason, sysinstall cannot load the module containing the aac
    driver; this results in an error dialog when starting sysinstall.
    Access to aac devices from within sysinstall is, understandably,
    broken by this error.  This appears to be due to a
    dependency on the linux module.  <em>Resolution:</em> The aac driver was
    brought back into the install kernels, and other modules were
    moved to modules.</li>

</ul>

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