Will 5.4 be an "Extended Life" release?

[Brett Glass]

At 03:33 PM 4/12/2005, Clifton Royston wrote:

>  If 5.4 is expected to be an extended-life branch, I would consider
>moving them up to 5.4 instead, to get a leap on current technology. 
>Has that decision been made yet?

I have a similar dilemma. Currently, I am building all production
servers with 4.11. But this means that I can't take advantage of
AMD64 processors or some other things that are available in 5.x.
And 5.x does some nice things, such as sandboxing BIND by default.
Finally, it seems as if CPU manufacturers are rapidly moving toward
multiple core processors, which need sophisticated SMP to work well.
So, I'd really like to move to 5.4 when it ships.

Trouble is, from the reports I'm seeing on the -STABLE list and
my own experiments, I don't yet know if 5.4 is going to be as 
fast (especially at disk access) or stable as 4.11. (Many of the
systems I am building will need very fast disk access, because they
will be used as database servers and caches.) What's more, here we 
are at RC2, and there are still a number of open issues, as shown at

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/todo.html

So, I am wondering if I should stick with 4.11, favoring fast single
CPUs over multiprocessor systems, for production machines -- and then 
jump to 6.0 when it's released. Will security fixes be available long 
enough for me to do this if need be?

--Brett Glass