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."

Comments

Hmmm

[scumbucket]

I guess this means that BSD isn't dying after all.
Sorry, couldn't resist......

OK , maybe this is a stupid question but....

[Viol8]

Is the 5.x series stable enough yet to use in a serious enviroment or should I stick to 4.x for
the time being? Even though I use FreeBSD (though admittedly only as a backup OS to Linux) I'm confused by their release policy. At what minor
version increment do current release branches become stable or are we supposed to just hope for the best?
If 5.0 was as unstable as I've heard in certain situations why was it ever released , why don't they just do the same as the linux kernel
team and keep releasing beta versions until things seem ok?

Re:*BSD is dying

[penguinstorm]

wow - this is a brave comment to make, especially hiding behind the mask that is 'anonymous coward'.

There's ample ammunition for the argument that FreeBSD is dead, but there's equally ample ammunition to support the view that FreeBSD development is strong. Given that it sits at the core of Apple's OS X, there is substantial opportunity to gain from this.

I think that the death of FreeBSD as an OS is premature: the death of commercial releases may be real.

I vastly prefer messing around with FreeBSD: faster, more stable and equally productive when compared to most Linux releases.

And Red Hat? Well, they've done a great job commercializing the thing, but does anybody actually like using it? It's a compromise - albeit a good one for some purposes. If I were installing desktops, it'd probably be my FreeOS of choice.