FreeBSD 5.4: Is it generally unstable?

[Charles Swiger]

On Jun 8, 2005, at 2:01 PM, Matthias Buelow wrote:
>> Me too, but a lot has changed since 5.2.1 which at the time was I  
>> think
>> was called a preview.  The topic is 5.4R.  What parts of the OS do  
>> you
>> feel are not production ready as compared to 4.X ?
>
> I won't go into the details here; it has crashed and frozen on me on
> several occasions, it behaves badly when you do things it does not
> expect, like pulling a mounted USB stick,

Yanking a mounted device out from under Unix has always been a no- 
no.  It would be nice if FreeBSD handled this better, but this  
problem falls into the "operator error: don't do that" category.

> it doesn't have working software RAID (Ok, vinum never worked properly
> but that's a different story),

This is a valid point-- the migration to 5.x and gvinum has not been  
pretty, and there are some gotchas lurking when people try to deal  
with multi-terabyte RAID arrays, MBR vs GPT, and so forth.

However, it's common to find half-decent hardware RAID functionality  
on many x86 and AMD64 motherboards, and PCI-based RAID cards are not  
very expensive.  I'd rather use RAID in hardware than software,  
myself, but if you think the current status of software RAID in 5.x  
isn't production ready, that strikes me as an understandable position  
to hold.

> and it's performance is sub-par.

5.3 and earlier especially have struck me as being noticably slower  
than 4.10 or so, but there have been significant improvements since  
then, and 5.4 and 4.1x seem to be comparable.  To do better than a  
broad generalization, however, you really need to pick some tasks and  
do real benchmarking to compare what is really going on.

-- 
-Chuck