svn commit: r187426 - head/sys/amd64/conf

[Maxim Sobolev]

Scott Long wrote:
> prepare to be wrong.  And above all else, don't put drivers into here
> that you haven't tested.  It's pretty silly to admit in your commit
> message, for all to see, that you are blatantly committing without
> testing.

Actually this is interesting point, what the best strategy for us as the 
project should be? Should we new put drivers that have been tested on 
i386 only and don't have any particular reason to be i386-specific (i.e. 
ISA/EISA drivers, PCMCIA drivers etc) into amd64 GENERIC automatically 
and wait for somebody to report a problem, or stay on the safe side and 
enable drivers on amd64 only after somebody actually has tested them and 
confirms that they are working? Should this policy depend on driver 
class (for example a storage driver has much higher potential for 
screwing user's data compared to a network driver or a sound driver) and 
on release (HEAD / STABLE)? IMHO FreeBSD could benefit by putting at 
least non-storage untested non i386-specific drivers into amd64 kernel 
and/or at least in HEAD to give them testing and a wider exposure.

This is not just idle interest for me - recently our company has started 
shipping amd64 version of our FreeBSD-based product, so that we are a 
little bit concerned about hardware support with amd64 7.1 kernel being 
a little bit narrower compared to i386 7.1 kernel.

I apologize if this topic has been discussed somewhere already.

-Maxim