Kernel Upgrades and Patches

[Loren M. Lang]

Are there any patches available for the FreeBSD kernel to support
features like acpi or usb 2.0 without upgrading to a full 5.1 kernel or
is it possible to use the 5.1 kernel without a full upgrade?

I'm curious if I could do something like in was doing in Linux before
linux 2.6 was officially released where I had the choice to run a 2.6
test kernel or load a 2.4 kernel so I could try out some of the new
features without dedicating my system to running it full time in case
of any stability problems.  I did have to upgrade a few core packages,
but I could just upgrade each one individually, and they were all fully
backward compatible and had no stability issues, by themselves.

Also, are there many patches for trying out new features like improving
latency on a system or trying out a new scheduler?  (These are just
examples I took from linux.)

And lastly, is there anyway to emulate running a linux device driver
or is it easy to port it to freebsd?
-- 
I sense much NT in you.
NT leads to Bluescreen.
Bluescreen leads to downtime.
Downtime leads to suffering.
NT is the path to the darkside.
Powerful Unix is.

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