FreeBSD 5.4: Is it generally unstable?

[Peter Jeremy]

On Wed, 2005-Jun-08 10:13:16 +1000, 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.

IMHO, just reading this mailing list will give you an overly negative
view of FreeBSD's stability.  My experiences are that FreeBSD 5.4
using a GENERIC kernel (or something close to it) is quite stable.
I'm only aware of one issue - relating to an interaction between
mysnc(2) and UFS2 snapshots - and that hasn't affected me so far..

Most of the problems I've seen on this list relate to one or more of:
- Experimenting with the ULE scheduler (which is not used by default)
- Experimenting with PREEMPTION (which is off by default)
- Having machines with 4GB or more of RAM
- Running 5-STABLE (the development version) rather than 5.4
- Having filesystems with lots (>>1e6) of inodes
- Unusual hardware (eg laptops)

My suggestion is that you install your application suite on FreeBSD 5.4
(either native or within VMware) and experiment for a while.  Your own
applications are by far the best test.  If you're happy with FreeBSD,
switch over.  If you run into problems, let us know.

At this stage, I would recommend 5.4 over 4.11.

-- 
Peter Jeremy