Status of 6.0 for production systems

[Kris Kennaway]

On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 10:00:48AM -0800, Danny Howard wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 03:14:25AM -0500, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> 
> > > 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.
> 
> So ... I am genuinely curious ... if 6.0 is basically 5.4 plus
> improvements, why isn't it called 5.5?

Because under the hood there are a few large changes to support the
performance optimizations (e.g. VFS locking), and some that break
compatibility.  FreeBSD tries to keep compatibility of interfaces
within a -STABLE branch, so if we called it 5.5 we'd have broken that
rule.

Kris

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20051110/ee909afa/attachment.bin