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.
The sysinstall(8) utility was updated to support multiple mail transfer agents (MTAs). As such, the familiar Network Services menu was modified to expose a new option entitled Mail.
The xl driver has recently been updated with full busdma support among other improvements. This driver will now work with large memory systems with PAE enabled.
The release notes will always be a good place to look for things to test.