FreeBSD 7.2-rc1

[Doug Hardie]

On Apr 18, 2009, at 14:05, Doug Hardie wrote:

> I have encountered a rather interesting issue trying to install  
> rc1.  The system boots and then says there is no disk in the CD  
> drive.  The rc1 disk1 downloaded fine and the checksums matched.   
> The CD will mount fine in other systems and can easily be read.  I  
> then let 7.0 boot on the test system and mounted the 7.2 cd.  It  
> mounts fine and I can read all the files ( well a few that I  
> tested).  Looking through the 7.0 dmesg I find some rather  
> unexpected entries for the CD drive.

...

Since I can't boot the CD, I did a source update.  Unfortunately I  
seem to have downloaded one of the kernel modules while it was being  
updated since it would not compile.  Since it was for hardware I don't  
have, I just commented it out and everything then built just fine.

#device         ath             # Atheros pci/cardbus NIC's
#device         ath_hal         # Atheros HAL (Hardware Access Layer)
#device         ath_rate_sample # SampleRate tx rate control for ath

I usually run a stress test on new releases.  Basically I open a ftp  
to a server (local LAN) and download gigs of data - more than the  
available free space on the drive.  With 7.1, the download would hang  
about 50% of the time.  There was free space remaining on the drive.   
The NIC was basically useless at that point.  The only way to restore  
it was to reboot.  The particular machine I am using right now only  
has an old decrepit rl NIC:

rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe000-0xe0ff mem  
0xdd104000-0xdd1040ff irq 12 at device 13.0 on pci0
rlphy0: <RealTek internal media interface> PHY 0 on miibus0
rlphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
rl0: Ethernet address: 00:d0:09:d8:8f:ff
rl0: [ITHREAD]

When running this test with 7.2-rc1 it always managed to make it to  
disk full and then terminate gracefully.  Looks like the rl NICs are  
going to be usable.  I had eliminated them from my production servers  
a long time ago.

The only real issue I encountered was that the number of files you  
have to respond to in mergemaster continues to grow (perhaps  
exponentially).  For my machine I maintain the source on thats no big  
issue.  However, it does cause a lot of additional down time for the  
servers.  I am going to have to dig through mergemaster to see if  
there is some way to tell it to automatically install the updates to  
specific directories (e.g., periodic, security, rc.d etc.).  I never  
touch them and they contribute the majority of manual entries.