5.1-RELEASE TODO

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 13 May 2003, Heiko Schaefer wrote:

> this might be the wrong way or place, but i want to state again (as i
> already stated in my thread about data corruption), that in my opinion
> it would be not a good idea to make a release of freebsd with the
> GENERIC kernel config as it is. 
> 
> not having the options
> 
> options           DISABLE_PSE
> options           DISABLE_PG_G
> 
> in the kernel config caused me data corruption which took hours of
> testing (and bothering people on this list) to figure out. apparently
> this problem is widespread and not only relevant to exotic fringe-case
> systems. 

There's a lot of worry that this is simply masking the bug, as opposed to
fixing it, as it's believed we already have workarounds for most of the
Intel bugs being discussed.  So we'd like to leave these out for now until
it's clear that they fix the bug rather than masking it on some machines
(and making it pop up on others).  BTW, at least once instance of the
"Intel bug" that has been proferred as a cause of these sorts of problems
was resolved by recently driver fixes in if_bge.

That said, we are actively discussing what, if any, workarounds are
appropriate, including some alternative workarounds from the ones
currently present.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories