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FreeBSD 4.9 Stability Update

Posted by michael on from the solid-as-a-rock dept.

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long would like to get a new poll on the stability and readiness of 4.9. The belief is that the last of the PAE-induced instability was resolved on August 31. Is anyone still experiencing unusual crashes, corruption, etc, on a system that is running with up-to-date sources? Now is the time to speak up and get the problems resolved. Scott is also requesting help with testing. In response to this, we are adding our own poll. Please vote and add comments as appropriate to help Scott."

5 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What instability? by questionlp · · Score: 5, Informative

    Drivers and applications can run into some issues with the way memory is windowed and accessed via PAE. It could be that the drivers that have issues access memory in a way that isn't too friendly to PAE or things are hardcoded so that they could end up with memory violations.

    It's kind of like making drivers work properly in non-SMP and SMP mode, mostly how interrupts are handled. It can get even trickier when you throw in NUMA or ccNUMA found in the AMD64 architecture. /me shrugs

  2. I hope you know what -STABLE means by dodell · · Score: 3, Informative

    Okay, education point here (if you know, then it's cool. If not, here's something you should know).

    The -STABLE branch is NOT STABLE! In the FreeBSD development cycle, the most stable systems run -RELEASE. Major development is done on -CURRENT. Working ideas are then moved into -STABLE (to stablize) -- a -STABLE system is a development system and is not guaranteed to boot. When the -STABLE branch proves itself to be very stable and contains enough new functionality, a -RELEASE snapshot is made. -STABLE should be renamed to -BETA or something similar (it actually was at one point, but this was retracted when a lot of people complained that they didn't want a -BETA branch, they wanted it to be stable).

    For more information, please read about -CURRENT and -STABLE and what they really are at http://freebsd.org/handbook/current-stable.html.

    Unless you're doing development and if these are production servers, I suggest that you run -RELEASE on them.

    --
    www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
    1. Re:I hope you know what -STABLE means by innosent · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think it's more like -MORESTABLETHANCURRENT. In other words, it's sort of like a point release (the xx part) in Linux's Stable tree (2.4.xx). It means something like "We've tested this, and it looks good, but let us know if anything breaks", as opposed to -CURRENT's "We've run this once or twice, still working on it, please help us get it to work correctly", and -RELEASE's "You didn't complain when it was STABLE, so we're not planning on fixing any bugs for a long time".

      So basically, CURRENT is like the 2.5.xx/2.6.xtest series of Linux, STABLE is like 2.4.xx, and RELEASE is more like 2.4.x9. Unless there are extreme circumstances, or important new hardware, RELEASE versions aren't put out that often. Hell, 4.7 and 4.8 were 6 months apart, and it'll be at least six months since 4.8 (April 3) before 4.9 is out.

      --
      --That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
    2. Re:I hope you know what -STABLE means by Echo|Fox · · Score: 5, Informative

      Errr, no.

      The -RELEASE branches _are_ kept secured as a security branch for all currently maintained -RELEASE branches.

      Any time a vulnerability is found, the patches go into -STABLE, but are also added to all of the supported -RELEASE trees, which would then show as a patchlevel in the version. If you cvsup a 4.8-RELEASE box to RELENG_4_8 right now, you'd end up with 4.8-RELEASE-p7, which would include patches for all of the security vulnerabilities up till now (including the latest OpenSSH and Sendmail vulnerabilities).

      Personally, I find tracking the security branches of -RELEASEs to be safer and more convenient, since I always know what is running on a given server. Since new features _are_ backported from -CURRENT to -STABLE, I could end up with two 4-STABLE machines running different versions of software. The only time I'll run -STABLE on a production server is when there is a bug in a -RELEASE, or there is a new feature in -STABLE I really need. And frankly, that hasn't happened since the early 3.x days.

  3. Re:What instability? by tgreiner · · Score: 2, Informative

    From what I remember from the discussions on the mailing list the PAE import seems to have various instabilities even if not running PAE. This needs to be ironed out before a release. And seemingly this IS already fixed.