Status of 6.0 for production systems

[Kris Kennaway]

On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 08:49:29PM -0500, Bob Johnson wrote:
> On 11/9/05, John Fox <jjf at mind.net> wrote:
> > I remember back a while when 5.x had been recently released
> > as STABLE and the conventional wisdom said not to use it in
> > production until the 5.3 release.
> >
> > Is there any such conventional wisdom as regards 6.x?
> 
> 5.0 introduced a lot of new features and replaced some major
> components, so the warning was that it would take longer than normal
> to reach a level of stability suitable for critical systems.
> 
> As I understand it, 6.0 is primarily concentrating on improving some
> of the major stuff introduced in 5.x, and shouldn't take nearly as
> long to become a "stable" platform.  Even so, conventional wisdom
> generally warns against using any X.0 release for critical
> applications, but that depends on your definition of "critical" and
> your level of tolerance for excitement.

You really shouldn't think of 6.0 as "like a usual .0 release, so
handle with care", but more like "5.4 plus extra optimization and
stability fixes".  We spent nearly 6 months during the release cycle
on stress-testing and fixing stability bugs, and that hard work
resulted in a lot of fixes to long-standing bugs that have existed
since FreeBSD 5.x.  In addition to the improved stability, performance
is much better than 5.4 in several areas.

Naturally there may be some regressions, but in the average case 6.0
seems to be an outstanding release of FreeBSD no matter what version
number you give it.

Kris
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