challenge: end of life for 6.2 is premature with buggy 6.3

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday 04 June 2008 01:20:56 pm Jo Rhett wrote:
> Okay, I totally understand that FreeBSD wants people to upgrade from  
> 6.2 to 6.3.  But given that 6.3 is still experiencing bugs with things  
> that are working fine and stable in 6.2, this is a pretty hard case to  
> make.
> 
> This is also a fairly significant investment in terms of time and  
> money for any business to handle this ugprade.  It totally understand  
> obsoleting 5.x now that 7.x is out.  But 6.2 is barely a year old...

FWIW, at Y! 6.3 is more stable than 6.2 (I had a list of about 10 patches for 
known deadlocks and kernel panics that were errata candidates for 6.2 that 
never made it into RELENG_6_2 but all of them are in 6.3).  We also have many 
machines with bge(4) and from our perspective 6.3 has less issues with bge0 
devices than 6.2.

Given the real world experience I have, your claims of instability w/o even 
testing 6.3 border on silly.  Also, when it comes to bge(4), you need to be 
_very_ specific about what chipsets you are using and comparing those with 
the chipsets in the bug reports you read.  The bge(4) driver in particular 
covers a vast range of different hardware variations and is a bit of a 
hodge-podge itself.  If there is a problem with a 5705 card then it may be 
specific to just 5705 parts and not affect 575x, etc. parts.

Again, with 3ware, there are two different drivers (twe(4) vs twa(4)) and 
again, you need to be more specific with which driver you are using and which 
model controllers you have.

-- 
John Baldwin