FreeBSD 5.4: Is it generally unstable?

[Greg Black]

On 2005-06-08, David Hogan wrote:

> Recently though, I've been playing around with FreeBSD 5.4 on a vmware box,
> and I'm beginning to think it may be the way forward in the long run. Having
> observed freebsd-stable at freebsd.org for the last couple of weeks, I've
> noticed a worrying (to me) amount of traffic regarding kernel panics,
> general instability etc, and I'm now posting this in the hope that I might
> obtain perspective on this from some experienced FreeBSD users.
> 
> In my time with the Trustix lists, I don't think I came across a serious
> kernel issue that wasn't caused by either a lack of a preinstalled driver or
> a bad stick of ram. Would you say that this holds true for FreeBSD? I
> realise that the FreeBSD user base is a much larger one than the Trustix
> user base, and I could be led to believe that the vast majority of people
> using 5.4 arent having any problems .. it's just my general impression that
> "something's up" with the stability of the 5.4 release. If I were to deploy
> a server right now, would a seasoned FreeBSD user use 4.11 or 5.4?

I'm currently moving all my customers from 4.x to 5.4 (having
run 5.3 and 5.4 on my own machines for some months).  I would
not move if they used multi-processor machines or non-Intel
machines -- but I would not allow my customers to use stuff like
that anyway, as none of it is really ready for production use.

If you're using standard uni-processor Intel boxes, there's no
reason not to go with 5.4; and there are lots of reasons to go
with it (and with 6.2 or so when it comes out).

Greg