fast rate of major FreeBSD releases to STABLE

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 16:30 +0100, Chris wrote:
> Stuff I would love to see in FreeBSD 7.x (CURRENT) before 7.0 release
> which looks like it isnt going to happen

[snip]

> More hardware support - FreeBSD still has poor hardware support when
> compared to other OS's, in particular vendors such as realtek nics.

Do you actually have a card which isn't recognised or doesn't work?  I
can only see one open PR about an unsupported Realtek NIC, and that is a
specific 3 port NIC, which is probably trivial to support.  I note also
that Realtek do provide FreeBSD drivers for all of their PCI network
cards.

If you are having problems, open a PR, and include information about the
card, a verbose dmesg, and the output of "pciconf -l" at the bare
minimum.

> A more user friendly installer so datacentres stop been put off FreeBSD.

Although work on a new installer is "ongoing", nobody ever seems to be
clear what the problems are with the current installer that they are
trying to fix.  I believe PC-BSD uses a different installer, which is
the current candidate, although I personally prefer the current one.
I'm guessing a new installer never make everybody happy.

> Work on the network code so STABLE stops panicing and lagging on low
> amounts of ddos that 4.x barely flexed at and even 5.x could cope
> with.

Again, 6.x is proving very stable for a *lot* of people.  What sort of
problems are you seeing?  URLs to posts on mailing lists would be fine.

As there are so many people using 6.x for huge work loads, it may well
be something specific to your workload/hardware etc, in which case you
may well have to help with debugging.

> The recent ports freeze has also concerned me, this is the longest
> ports freeze I have witnessed since I started using FreeBSD years ago
> and its for a desktop element of the os, does it matter if servers
> running FreeBSD have to remain on vulnerable versions of ports as a
> result of this?

Kris has already responded to this.

> The viability of upgrading FreeBSD to a new major version at least
> every 2 years is small, can choose not to upgrade as security patches
> will exist but ports only get supported on the latest STABLE tree now
> and I expect 5.x development will be killed off like 4.x was when 7.0
> hits release.

[ I speak purely as a FreeBSD user myself, here]

Information on EoLs of various releases is available at
http://www.freebsd.org/security/ - showing that support for both both
5.5 and 6.1 extend over a year from now.  Given the current plan is to
release 7.0 some time this year, there's at least 6 months of overlap
there.  And given 6.3 isn't yet released, and "will be supported by the
Security Officer for a minimum of 12 months after the release", there
will be a fair amount of overlap there too.  And I wouldn't be surprised
if at least one more 6.x release is designated an "extended support"
release.

> Why cant 7.0 be released when more long awaited features are added and
> then not as STABLE tree only as CURRENT (like 5.0 was) and if 7.0 is
> considered stable then 7.1 can be STABLE branch.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/version-guide/past-schedules.html
explains this far better than I ever could.

>   I consider 6.2 to be
> the first release in 6.x branch close to proper stability and that
> release is under a year old before a new major release is due.

Again, without knowing what issues you saw, I'm not sure anyone can
answer that.  The only real issues I am aware of with 6.0/6.1 that
weren't fixed with errata patches were either quota, IPv6 or CARP
related.

> Please dont flame me as I am a avid FreeBSD server user not a fan of
> linux so not been a troll this is a serious post.

Please don't take my response as a flame :)

Gavin