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FreeBSD 5.3 Release Candidate Released
Cronopios writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has just announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-RC1. This will likely be the only Release Candidate before the final release of 5.3, so please give it a try and report/fix any bug you find.
You can read the announcement, check the schedule and the 'Known Issues' (problems that
are still being worked on at this time)."
The thing that *really* is of concern for the future of FreeBSB 5.x is the very complex SMP/Thread coding model in is used in 5.x and the fact there only seems to be 2-3 individuals on planet earth that are able to fix and fix bugs in the code. (See the recent posting(s) in the -arch mailing list for some examples of this. This is really a cause of major concern for the future of 5.x. Matt Dillon (aka the Dragonfly BSD project) has constantly been sounding alarm bells about this but no one on the project seems to be concerned at all about this issue.
With the many bugs in 5.x that cause many mysterious crashes and lockups in SMP systems, and that fact that only several people on planet earth seem to have the detailed knowledge of the code to find them, this should be a major source of concern for anyone considering using 5.x in any sort of production application ?
This also flies in the face of this troll's claims of FreeBSD developers are uncooperative *sholes. Follow this thread to its end, and you'll see that even though the original poster (as DES rightly claims) was quite confrontative, they went out of their way to reproduce the issue. Robert Watson even commited some code to help trace down similar problems. And some stats from the same guy later, when the problem was solved: