FreeBSD 5.4-RC2 Available

[Claus Guttesen]

> We encourage people to help with testing so any final bugs can be identified
> and worked out.  At this point the only major problem has been reports
> of large server (4 processors or more) hanging under extreme load conditions
> (varied load of local processes like database and heavy network load).
> Details to help with debugging have been hard to obtain so if anyone is
> in a position to help with trying to reproduce this it would be appreciated.

5.4 RC1 is running on our webservers, a combo of dual Xeon's, Noconas
and Opterons without any problems. It's also running on our firewall
with pf and the performance is quite nice, less than 10 % utilization.

I have a NFS-server running 5.3 beta 3 which is accessed by the
webservers. The volume is lightly accessed. Next week it will host a
new volume which will have a lot of activity, so I'd like to upgrade
it to 5.4 RC2 before that (saturday). Looking at the only major
problems left, I feel pretty comfortable that RC2 will be very stable.

The NFS-server is a Compaq dual PIII at 1 GHz (G2), 3 GB RAM, Smart
RAID 5 (ciss), qlogic 2310 hba and an Intel GBIC-card (em).

The em-driver is mpsafe and the isp-driver is not, but overall the
performance should be better with 5.4 compared to 5.3. Has anyone had
the opportunity to compare NFS on 5.3 and 5.4?

Should I play it safe and wait until May before I upgrade?

regards
Claus