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<!ENTITY title "Testing Guide for 4.5-RELEASE">
<!ENTITY email "qa">
]>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>&title;</title>
<cvs:keyword xmlns:cvs="http://www.FreeBSD.org/XML/CVS">$FreeBSD$</cvs:keyword>
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<body class="navinclude.download">
<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>
</body>
</html>
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