PRs included in release

[Doug Hardie]

I encountered what I thought was an unusual situation, although it just may be that I don't understand something.  I have a system that was originally installed 9.2 Release.  It wouldn't find the NIC and hence couldn't work.  Someone here told me I needed to get the patches from a couple PRs and install them and the NIC would work.  This was about a year ago.  As they indicated, those patches fixed the problem and the system has worked properly ever since.

However, there are a number of security fixes that have been issued for 9.0 and I was really hesitant to upgrade (freebsd-update) as I suspected that there would be an issue with those patches not being included.  Anyway, I decided to try the update and sure enough on reboot the NIC didn't get recognized or configured.  Fortunately freebsd-update include a very handy rollback function that does exactly what I expected.  I was down for only a few minutes.

The question then becomes how do I know if the patches for a specific PR are included in a security release? I am guessing that those patches will be included in 9.3, but I would like some way to check before attempting an update.  Most of my systems do not have the system source as I try to use generic kernels wherever possible.  Freebsd-update is much more convenient than a complete system rebuild.