[fbsd] HEADS UP: FreeBSD 5.3, 5.4, 6.0 EoLs coming soon

[Hugo Koji Kobayashi]

Hi,

On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 12:21:06PM +0200, Jeremie Le Hen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, Oct 01, 2006 at 12:30:22AM -0700, FreeBSD Security Officer wrote:
> > Users of FreeBSD 4.11 systems are also reminded that that FreeBSD 4.11
> > will reach its End of Life at the end of January 2007 and that they
> > should be making plans to upgrade or replace such systems.
> 
> Though I admit RELENG_4 is getting dusty, it is not rusty.  I believe it
> is still used in many places because of its stability and
> performance.

You bet !

> 
> For instance, according to Julian Elischer's posts, it seems he is still
> working on it.
> 
> Is it envisageable to extend the RELENG_4's and RELENG_4_11's EoL once
> more ?

Until we can't get at least 90% of the UDP performance of the 4.11 on
the 6.x or upcoming releases, high performance DNS servers need it and
we should keep supporting 4.11. If we don't do that people will move
to something else.

On UP servers 4.11 is still head to head to Linux 2.6 (actually, Linux
got to be head to head to 4.11 only in 2.6). On SMP servers Linux
outperform 4.11 by 10%. 6.x don't get even close to 50% of 4.11
performance on UP and is still worse on SMP.

This is extensively tested, documented and is reproducible [1].

For the good of the FreeBSD we should urge the security team to extend
4_11 EoL.


Regards,
Hugo

[1] http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2006-September/011748.html
    http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2006-September/011846.html