FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1 Available
Robert Watson
rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Sun Jul 17 19:11:59 GMT 2005
On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, Yann Golanski wrote:
> Quoth Scott Long on Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 09:18:50 -0600
>> Part of the purpose of moving quickly on to RELENG_6 is so that the
>> migration work for users from 5.x to 6.x is very small. 6.x is really
>> just an evolutionary step from 5.x, not the life-altering revolutionary
>> step that 4.x->5.x was. It should be quite easy to deploy and maintain
>> 5.x and 6.x machines side-by-side and migrate them as the need arises.
>> We don't want people to be stranded on RELENG_5 like they were with
>> RELENG_4. 6.x offers everything of 5.x, but with better performance
>> and (hopefully) better stability. If you're thinking about evaluating
>> 5.x, give 6.0 a try also.
>
> Does that mean that a cvsup with "*default tag=RELENG_6" and a rebuilt
> of the world will work smoothly? Would it work at all? Is it even
> recommended?
>
> I suspect that re-compiling every port is a good idea after making the
> world in any case.
I've run into two stumbles that are easily worked around once known:
(1) I had to rm -Rf /usr/obj/... because incremental buildworld seemed
unhappy as a result of directory and content changes. I don't know
what that is.
(2) /dev/cuaa* has been renamed to /dev/cuad*
Otherwise, be aware that as with 5.x running 4.x binaries, 6.x needs
compat stuff to run 5.x binaries. My intuition is that this is an area of
the 6.x release that will need further honing, as I'm not sure there's a
COMPAT5X library set in 6.x yet. If you're doing an incremental
buildworld, this won't be a problem, but if you install a new 6.x machine,
it might be. Likewise, BETA1 shipped without the kernel compat option,
which won't affect most binaries, but this will be fixed in BETA2.
So I think the usual advice holds true in general: do it on a test machine
first, and backup, before your production machine with 10,000 users and
your only copy of all your data. :-) 6.x seems to be flawlessly picking
up work from my 5.x machines now, and generally working better. And
hopefully in another week I'll get the netstat -mb fixes for SMP merged to
RELENG_6 so that the mbuf allocation counters don't leak under high load
on SMP resulting in erroneous statistics, a bug that has irritated me
substantially in the 5.x branch.
Robert N M Watson
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