FreeBSD 5.4: Is it generally unstable?

[Brian Fundakowski Feldman]

On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 08:01:55PM +0200, Matthias Buelow wrote:
> Mike Tancsa wrote:
> 
> >> I remember 5.2.1 panicking left and right, on several machines, it was
> >> completely unusable.  Maybe we just live in different universes.
> > 
> > Me too, but a lot has changed since 5.2.1 which at the time was I think
> > was called a preview.  The topic is 5.4R.  What parts of the OS do you
> > feel are not production ready as compared to 4.X ?
> 
> I won't go into the details here; it has crashed and frozen on me on
> several occasions, it behaves badly when you do things it does not
> expect, like pulling a mounted USB stick, it doesn't have working
> software RAID (Ok, vinum never worked properly but that's a different
> story), and it's performance is sub-par.  I consider it "production
> ready" when the new architecture has fully been implemented, GIANT is
> gone, all those race conditions and deadlocks that seemingly still
> persist have been fixed, and is has weathered a release or two after
> that without apparent problems.

Haven't had a single problem putting 5.x into production as database
servers, mail servers, other backend things, etc. here...  The
performance is very good for most things.  Removing a device while
it's opened is something that has never worked.  Giant existing is not
really something that doesn't make it productonable.  Also, vinum is
now gvinum, and there's also graid3 and gmirror, so I don't know why
you say there isn't working software RAID.

The major occasions where things really didn't work right were with
IPFW, and I found and fixed those (well, one of them is not yet
committed).  I had never tried the IPFW-compatible bridge(4) before,
but it is significantly broken (crashes bridging two fxp(4)).  So
caveat emptor using it as a firewall for the time being...  The other
problem I have had is that doing CD burning can sometimes crash the
system, but I haven't tried using a real SCSI drive instead.

-- 
Brian Fundakowski Feldman                           \'[ FreeBSD ]''''''''''\
  <> green at FreeBSD.org                               \  The Power to Serve! \
 Opinions expressed are my own.                       \,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,\