Status of 6.0 for production systems

[Wojciech Puchar]

> I remember back a while when 5.x had been recently released
> as STABLE and the conventional wisdom said not to use it in
> production until the 5.3 release.
>
> Is there any such conventional wisdom as regards 6.x?
>

my home system is actually production system that can't be stopped for a 
long time. i moved finally from NetBSD for various reasons including real 
SMP support (real=not crashing and not all-giant lock).

what i can say is

1) performance is excellent. maybe it should be named FastBSD not FreeBSD :)

2) it DO has bugs, but i already filtered those than can make a problems 
for me.

3) first bug - kldunload means danger. many kernel modules just crash the 
system when unloaded. solution: just don't do it, not a real problem.

4) using kernel-ppp+pppd=crash after not a long time. that forced my to 
learn user ppp(8) which is actually MUCH better. same solution as 3.
anyway i don't see any reason why kernel ppp is maintained at all. user 
ppp+tun interface works perfect.

5) sio driver has bugs. no crashes but overruns are reported by thousands 
unless i patched sio.c to increase buffer eightfold. the real bug is 
somewhere else, and can always be repeated with just
dd if=/dev/ad0 bs=1m of=/dev/null

the larger bs - the larger buffer have to be set to fix it until some 
value than enlarging bs to anything doesn't break things at all.

i don't know how this all works in kernel so have no idea about the real 
fix.

but this fix is enough for now. if you don't use high-speed serial it 
shouldn't be a problem for you anyway.

6) still have to learn ipfw more, an excellent tool! incomparably better 
than NetBSD's ipf!



found no bugs on other things and system works stable. for 4 days now but 
stable without any problems, having stable 921kbps ppp link (which is my 
outbound connection) and all userlevel programs working fine.