HEADS UP: FreeBSD 6.4 and 8.0 EoLs coming soon

[Mark Linimon]

> > The reason is performance for overall network stack, not ideology.

> For a practical reasons, "it works but slow" is better than
> "doesn't work at all (due to absence of code in the src tree)".
> "Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast. In that order", know this?
> Sacrificing "work" for "fast"?.. Hmm, if it is not ideology, then what is
> it?..

It wasn't "it works but slow".  It was "it works, but networking throughput
is limited on the modern hardware that the majority of our users employ".
In particular, IIUC, 10GB network drivers were suffering under the old
strategy.  We simply were not competitive with other OSes, and we have
many multiples more users interested in 10GBE than in ISDN.

> You do not understand the problem. It is not in notices & volunteers, but
> rather in the Project's policy - delete something which could still work.

You do not understand how this was handled.

The situation was: an announcement was made that "in X months, all network
drivers need to be made to run Giant-free so that FreeBSD can drop Giant
from the neworking stack to move forward."  Within that period, most of
the drivers were updated.  Repeated postings were made to the mailing list
that "the following drivers still have not been converted, and need to be
updated or they will be dropped."  They weren't; they were droppped.

So while it could "still" work, it was slowing down progress.

The fact of the matter is, FreeBSD is a big project with a finite number
of developers.  We try to keep as much coverage of systems as we can, but
a reality of any large software engineering project is that older features
sometimes have to be dropped to make progress.

The code still exists in the repository for any interested party to pick
up and modernize.

mcl