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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 4.5-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>Recent TCP changes, especially relating to the delayed ACK fix,
    congestion response, syncache, syncookies, increased socket buffer
    sizes, et al.  We're interested in testing interoperability with
    as many platforms as possible, demonstrating continued strong (and
    better) scalability and performance, and watching out for quirks
    (connection stalls, ...), not to mention crashes.  Jonathan Lemon
    was responding to a panic report on freebsd-current earlier today
    regarding a PCB call, which is something we should keep an eye on.
    On the other hand, <a href="http://www.yahoo.com/">Yahoo!</a> is
    now deploying this code, and that should help test it a great
    deal.<br><br></li>
    
  <li>VFS/VM/NFS fixes.  We need to continue to test performance,
    correctness, and interoperability.  In particular, I'd like to see
    a lot of inter-platform performance testing (FreeBSD->Solaris,
    vice versa, etc).  We'd also like careful investigation of
    low-memory situations.<br><br></li>
    
  <li>FFS fixes.  We had some reports of deadlocks in FFS; it sounds like
    Matt Dillon has caught most of them, but combinations I'd particular
    like to see tested involve Quotas, Chroot, and NFS, under load, and 
    involving memory mapping and heavy directory operations.<br><br></li>

  <li>NTP 4.1.  This is probably reasonable safe, but it doesn't hurt
    to do interop testing, especially on the Alpha platform.<br><br></li>
    
  <li>SMBfs.  We need stability testing, mostly, I suspect.  Performance is
    probably not a large focus.  While SMBfs support has been available on
    -STABLE through a port previously, determining that the integration 
    with the base system (especially the boot process) was done correctly
    is important.  Attempting to use SMBfs in /etc/fstab in a diskless
    environment might be one thing to explore, for example.<br><br></li>
    
  <li>Once the man page change goes in (which I think it should) we'll want
    some basic testing of the man command.  <strong>Update:</strong>
    This change proved too controversial for introduction this late in
    the release cycle, and so it will not be included with FreeBSD
    4.5.<br><br></li>

  <li>cdboot.  Late in the release cycle, a new implementation of the
    CD-based boot loader was introduced.  This should generally
    improve support for booting or installing from CD, but this change
    requires testing on a variety of architectures and devices.
    <strong>Update:</strong> Thanks to everyone who helped test this
    functionality.  A number of users reported problems booting with
    this new loader, so this will not be used for FreeBSD 4.5.<br><br></li>

  <li>Sysinstall module loading.  In order to make room for more
    devices on the boot floppy, a number of wireless Ethernet device
    drivers were moved over to the MFSROOT floppy in the form of
    loadable kernel modules.  We would like to see this functionality
    tested thoroughly before the final release.<br><br></li>

  <li>ATA code.  The ATA driver has been updated to support 48bit
    addressing and has been tested to work with at least one 160GB IDE
    drive.  Further testing with very large IDE drives is
    necessary.<br><br></li>

  <li>XFree86.  There was at least one problem report with XFree86 4.x
    sent to the <tt>qa@FreeBSD.org</tt> mailing list.  Please help us
    test this important third party software package to ensure it
    works well with FreeBSD 4.5.  The FreeBSD Handbook may need to be
    updated to describe the recommended procedure for installing
    XFree86 4.x during a new installation.</li>

  <li>Linux Compatibility.  There was a small change in the Ethernet
    device enumeration of the Linux compatibility layer.  All Linux
    applications should be tested under the new environment.  In
    particular, those applications that deal with network interfaces
    should be tested carefully.</li>

</ul>

<p>The <a href="../../relnotes.html">release notes</a> will always be
  a good place to look for things to test.  There are a number of new
  drivers, including <tt>if_em</tt>, which would probably benefit from
  more exposure.  Please report bugs to the <a
  href="mailto:qa@FreeBSD.org">qa@FreeBSD.org</a> list, and/or via
  send-pr with a heads up to the qa list.</p>

<h3>Known Issues</h3>

<p><a href="ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386">4.5
  Release Candidate 3</a> was released on January 23.  There will be
  one final release candidate before the final release.  Please see
  the postings to qa@FreeBSD.org and stable@FreeBSD.org for more
  information.</p>

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