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FreeBSD 4.9 RC1 Ready For Testing
wumpus188 writes "FreeBSD Release Eng. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of first release candidate for FreeBSD 4.9 (RC1). He is requesting everyone to download and test, including helping with finding bugs. As indicated in the Release Engineering Team's testing agenda, more testing should be done with PAE systems to test device compatibility and performance. In particular, active systems with 12 gigs of RAM or more should be thoroughly tested to make sure the various memory allocation algorithms in the kernel still scale properly."
It is still at least 1.5 months until 4.9 is released, according to the release schedule, and generally the FreeBSD team will accept delays in the interest of stability and not rush out something half-baked. 5.0 has been delayed more than one year, IIRC. During such a timeframe, certain other free Unix-like OSes change half of your supposedly stable kernel under your back and accidentally eat your file systems three times without bumping the minor version number.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Your kernel is probably tagged as 4.9-PRERELEASE, as all of mine are.
"Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
If you want stability, use STABLE releases, (4.8, 4.9 in a few days/weeks).
If you want the bleeding edge, you can try CURRENT (HEAD, 5.1). But they call it bleeding edge, because you might cut yourself, you know.
That said, I am using a 5-CURRENT machine to write this. I haven't had major troubles with this. But, if you aren't the kind of person who would use a odd-numbered kernel in linux, you should stick with STABLE releases. I have all my production machines in STABLE, I only use CURRENT in my "expendable" machines (like my own workstation).
There is information on which branch is STABLE - Production (at this moment its last release was 4.8, soon will be 4.9) and which branch is CURRENT - Technology Preview (at this moment, the last release was 5.1, will be 5.2 in a while) on the freebsd home page (www.freebsd.org).
Personally, I plan to switch when 5.2 is released, though. Mostly for the filesystem snapshots and background fsck. I too use FBSD 5 on my personal workstation and have scince 5.0-RELEASE, without any problems, so I don't worry too much.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
RELENG_4 tracks -stable. This is a moving target and isn't always stable or usable. All new developments in the 4.x branch are made here, and all new releases in the 4.x branch are tagged from here.
RELENG_4_X tracks 4.X + security fixes. Security fixes and super-major bug fixes are the only things that get added to this branch. No new features will be added here.
RELENG_4_X_Y_RELEASE will get you 4.X.Y release, the same code as is put on the CDs.