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FreeBSD 4.9 Stability Update
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."
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.
/me shrugs
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.
I, for one, am very pleased to see the release team err on the side of caution and make sure that stability issues have been resolved before releasing 4.9. It seems that too much software is release way too early - and while not intended to be a troll - especially Linux with it's libc and kernel du'jour. I'll use Linux when I have no choice, but the stability and ease of use of FreeBSD make it my top choice for my x86 servers.
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.
You guys keep feeding the trolls!
Everytime someone posts the same copy-and-paste bit for the 2334th time, some idiot responds as if the troll poster thinks what he is pasting is true.
Want to make them go away? Then don't reply! Pretend they don't exist. Just let moderators take care of then and you'll have much less of a troll problem on your hands.