Re: Why I should use FBSD 4.9/10 and not 5.2.1?
From: Tim Daneliuk (tundra_at_tundraware.com)
Date: 05/05/04
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Date: 05 May 2004 04:50:08 EDT
Michel Talon wrote:
> Kris Kennaway <kkenn@xor.obsecurity.org> wrote:
>
>>In other words, the instability was caused by a buggy BIOS on his SMP
>>hardware that just happened to be tickled by the newer version of
>>FreeBSD.
>
>
> This sentence exactly means that recent FreeBSD-4 versions are buggy for
> all practical purposes. Ask someone who has one hundred or one thousand
> servers to upgrade the BIOS of all machines, with the risks that
> represents:
> -that the upgrade doesn't succeed and the machine is rendered unbootable
> -that the upgrade succeeds but doesn't solve the problem
> not to mention that you need DOS partitions or DOS floppies and in this
> case floppy drives, etc. My experience on my laptop is indeed that
> FreeBSD-4 was much better around 4.5 than it is now. And i will not
> upgrade BIOS at any price. I still prefer running FreeBSD-4.9 as is.
> As for FreeBSD-5.2 it runs perfectly fine for me on my desktop, but
> obviously this depends on the hardware, etc. Clearly it is slower than
> it used to be under FreeBSD-4, notably in the network stack, but
> nothing dramatic, and i can live with that. It has been perfectly
> stable for me, not a single hang since i installed 5.2. I cannot say
> the same thing for my other desktop which runs Debian Linux with a 2.4
> kernel.
>
>
>
>>Kris
>
I have had just the opposite experience w/5.2.1. 4.x and 5.2 have both
run pretty much flawlessly on all the uniprocessor machines I have
tried. But an attempt over the weekend to install 5.2.1 on a Dell
Poweredge 1300/600 dual processor machine was ... well, less than
successful. I got through most of an installation and saw a panic with a
message to the effect of "reboot() sent to CPU0" or some such thing.
This continued when the machine saw heavy loads as I worked with it
over the next 10 hours or so.
Hours of fiddling around convinced me this was not a hardware or memory
problem, so I installed 4.10-RC which has been running flawlessly ever
since - with SMP enabled, BTW.
I anticipate the day 5.x is hardened, but in its current state, it is
not a production-ready system. This is not a criticism. The FreeBSD team
have made this clear since 5.x came out: for the moment it is and
remains an "early adopter" technology...
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tim Daneliuk tundra@tundraware.com PGP Key: http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/
- Next message: Mike Scott: "Re: Why I should use FBSD 4.9/10 and not 5.2.1?"
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- In reply to: Michel Talon: "Re: Why I should use FBSD 4.9/10 and not 5.2.1?"
- Next in thread: Kris Kennaway: "Re: Why I should use FBSD 4.9/10 and not 5.2.1?"
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