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:
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.
OpenSSL. OpenSSL was updated to 0.9.7a. Please test any SSL consumers on your system to make sure there have been no regressions in functionality.
IPFilter has recently been updated to version 3.4.31 and has not yet been thoroughly tested in -STABLE.
Firewire
libc_r - A change has been made to fix libc_r in the case when a non-standard value of KVA_PAGES is used in the kernel. libc_r in general could use testing with real applications.
dlinfo() added - test your shared-library - heavy ports to make sure there are no build problems.
ISC DHCP 3.0.1 RC11 has recently been added to 4.8RC. This version of the ISC DHCP client was used in 5.0-RELEASE, and should be well tested, but it was only recently made available to 4.X-STABLE users so it has not received much testing to date in that environment.
The release notes will always be a good place to look for things to test.