Possibility for FreeBSD 4.11 Extended Support

Michael R. Wayne freebsd at wayne47.com
Thu Dec 21 21:46:40 PST 2006


On Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 09:59:34PM -0500, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> spork at bway.net writes:
>
> >-5.x was never really for production use, in the same way 3.x never
> >was.
>
> Why do people continue to say this?  Many sites have used, are still
> using, and plan to continue to use, 5.x in production.


I'm going to copy a bit of mail that I sent to someone privately.

FreeBSD 4.11 can survive a simple burn-in test.  FreeBSD 5.X and
6.1 can not.  Here's what I wrote earlier.

   Take a server.  Configure for SMP, add quotas within jails and
   basic IPFW protection with a few hundred dummynet pipes for b/w
   throttling (less than 10,000 total IPFW lines).  Load the machine
   a bit so that it constantly maintains a 3 digit load and run
   sufficient active processes to keep it in moderate swap state.
   The result of that minimal-effort test yields machines which can
   not maintain 30 days of uptime (most fail in under a week).

   And don't even THINK about snapshots in 6.1 or earlier.

>THAT< is why people who run servers, with jails, quotas, ipfw and
moderate load keep complaining about 5.X and 6.1 and begging for
4.11 support to be extended.  Just because someone has a few FreeBSD
boxes running light loads and not using the features that we NEED
does not mean that any the port 4.11 releases to date are stable.

/\/\ \/\/


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