FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE Status Update

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Bruce Mah provides the latest status of what's holding up the official release of FreeBSD 4.8. We fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product."

Comments

BSD is cool

[mao che minh]

But does it run Linux?

Re:BSD is cool

[ManDude]

hmm

Re:BSD is cool

[bahwi]

Why yes, it does. =)

OT, but I *have* to ask this

[arvindn]

What's the point of linking to Bruce Mah's email in the article?? It doesn't give any information about him, so it's pointless. And I'd be very surprised if it doesn't have the effect of filling his inbox with both spam and other random mail he doesn't want to see. Please, this is not a troll. I've seen this done a few times, and I can't imagine why. Anyone?

Here's the text of it from bsdforums.org

[toadf00t]

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Bruce Mah provides the latest status of what's holding up the official release of FreeBSD 4.8. Our take: we fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product. Thanks mezz, our forums moderator for the newstip.

[Read full announcement]

Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 16:23:25 -0800
From: "Bruce A. Mah"
To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject: 4.8-RELEASE status

Hi--

A number of you have been (rightfully) wondering what's up with
the i386 4.8-RELEASE. Here's the current state:

The files that are as of this moment tagged as RELENG_4_8_0_RELEASE
can't be used to build a release because the MFSROOT kernel (that goes
on the kern.flp) overflows a the size of a 1440K floppy disk.

This bug was masked by another problem that happened to be present on
the machines used by the RE team to build releases...namely, that they
didn't have the cvsroot-all collection in their local repositories.
To make a long story short, the $FreeBSD$ tags didn't get expanded in
the source files, thus (I am not making this up) causing the MFSROOT
kernel to be just a *little* bit smaller so that it could fit on a
floppy. I think this was the world's April Fool's joke to the RE
team.

We're currently trying to fix this by finding some other driver we can
move to a module on the mfsroot.flp image (or maybe just eliminate).
After we finish some tests, we'll need to commit whatever change is
required, re-tag the affected files, and then rebuild the base system.

I'm not in a position to comment on a timeline for these happenings.

Thanks for your continued patience!

Bruce.

PS. This may sound rude, for which I apologize in advance: The less
time that the RE team has to spend replying to various emails
(particularly those that are not relevant to the immediate goal of
shipping 4.8-RELEASE), the faster the release is probably going to be
finished.

A floppy?

[repetty]

"The files that are as of this moment tagged as RELENG_4_8_0_RELEASE can't be used to build a release because the MFSROOT kernel (that goes on the kern.flp) overflows a the size of a 1440K floppy disk."

It's 2003 and a sparkling new Unix OS is being held up by... a floppy?

I remember floppies... I used them back in the 80's and very early 90's.

I'm glad that they are sticking by their principles on this. I just wonder if they are principles worth sticking to.

--Richard

Re:A floppy?

[questionlp]

Although floppies are antiquated, but there are still machines that will not boot off of bootable CDs and require a boot floppy (I have several Toshiba laptops that just will not boot from CD no matter what setting is used or how the ISO is burned)... but it's also useful to get a machine booted to either do a re-install or install from an FTP or an NFS server.

Anyway, most bootable CDs use floppy images (be it 1.44MB or 2.88MB) as the boot section of the CD... primarily for legacy/compatibility purposes. With that, you still have to deal with the size limitation of either 1.44MB or 2.88MB.

Re:A floppy?

[dills]

Oh, they're definitely principles worth sticking to.

I don't put CD-ROMs in the servers I build. It's stupid, why would they need CD-ROMs? I just install a floppy drive, because it needs one of those regardless (hardware bios updates, emergency recovery, etc.).

I boot off the install floppies and install via FTP (takes LESS time than via CD when doing so on a T3).

The floppies are extremely important. Many shops rely on them.

Andy

Resolved already...

[oneiric]

This is good slashdot fodder, but the issue has been resolved. The awi driver (wireless prism card) is being removed from the floppy and the space problem is solved. Move along nothing to see here...

Re:Who's "We"?

[L. VeGas]

"We" are the world. "We" are the children.

Guess you haven't heard "our" song.

Re:Funny reason

[stratjakt]

Because everyone is not you.

There are a lot of headless 'nix based gateway boxes around with a floppy, and no CD-ROM.

I love the "i dont need it so therefore noone possibly could" attitude slashbots have.

Re:confused

[Just Some Guy]

In an almost exact parallel, there are versions of the Linux 2.4.x kernel that are newer than versions of the Linux 2.5.x kernel.

In other words, 5.0 is not production-ready, although it is a complete release. It's still being actively debugged and stabilized in preperation for 5.1, which will probably be the first in the series that I'd put on a production server. The 4.x line is incredibly stable and still being actively maintained in the mean time.