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

Robert Watson rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Fri Oct 13 06:24:54 UTC 2006


On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Chris Laco wrote:

> Just a lurker, and FreeBSD users since late 3.0... From my personal 
> experience of (4) 4.x machines and (1) 5.x machine, all on the same 
> hardware, I've had more problems with my 5.x install than I ever did with my 
> 4.x install. I'm afraid to even look to see if 6.0 will run on it.

6.x is a significantly more refined release series than 5.x ever was, and this 
is a result of a lot of very hard work.  If you didn't like 5.x, you should 
try 6.x and see how it does for you.  Don't assume that problems you may have 
experienced in 5.x persist.  In particular, the whole world of ACPI has 
matured drastically in the last 3-4 years, which has resolved a lot of issues 
with hardware probing, etc, that existed in earlier 5.x releases.  Part of 
this is vendors fixing their BIOS's, part of it is improvements in the Intel 
ACPI CA code, and part of it is adding blacklisting, workarounds, etc, for 
known BIOS problems.  File system performance and stability have gone up 
drastically, as has network performance and stability.  So I would encourage 
you to re-evaluate in the 6.x world, ideally with the most recent 6.x release 
available.  Undoubtably there will be imperfections, but as I hope the 6.x 
release processes have revealed, we're working hard to resolve any issues.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge


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