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

[Bruce Evans]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Dmitry Pryanishnikov wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Jeremie Le Hen wrote:
>> ...
>> Is it envisageable to extend the RELENG_4's and RELENG_4_11's EoL once
>> more ?
>
>  Yes, I'm also voting for it. This support may be limited to 
> remote-exploitable vulnerabilities only, but I'm sure there are many old
> slow routers for which RELENG_4 -> 6 transition still hurts the performance.
> RELENG_4 is the last stable pre-SMPng branch, and (see my spring letters,
> Subject: RELENG_4 -> 5 -> 6: significant performance regression)
> _very_ significant UP performance loss (which has occured in RELENG_4 -> 5
> transition) still isn't reclaimed. So I think it would be wise to extend
> { RELENG_4 / RELENG_4_11 / both } [may be limited] support.

I hesitate to do anything to kill RELENG_4, but recently spent a few
days figuring out why the perfomance for building kernels over nfs
dropped by much more than for building of kernels on local disks between
RELENG_4 and -current.  The most interesting loss (one not very specific
to kernels) is that changes on 6 or 7 Dec 2004 resulted in open/close
of an nfs file generating twice as much network traffic (2 instead of
1 Access RPCs per open) and thus being almost twice as slow for files
that are otherwise locally cached.  This combined with not very low
network latency gives amazingly large losses of performance for things
like "make depend" and cvs checkouts where 1 RPC per open already made
things very slow.

Bruce