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)."
Looking at the 5.3 issues on questions@freebsd.org most people wouldn't trust 5 as stable yet, and on a uniprocessor most say 5 is slower than 4.x.
I do note there are tentative plans for a 4.11 release, but as most of the work is concentrating on 5.x it's existence maybe a still birth.
BTW MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger) is based on 5.x rather than 4.x technology so someone's trusting enough..
And yes 5.2.1 is definitely fast on SMP systems then 4.10.
There appear to be bugs in the new SMP scheduler (SCHED_ULE) that no one can track down that cause mysterious crashes and lockups when a system is run under heavy load. The real issue seems to be that only a couple people in the project understand the complex kernel threading model enough to be able to find and resolve bugs, and even they don't seem to be able too most of the time ?