From owner-freebsd-questions Wed May 1 7:53:20 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from otter.mills-atl.com (dsl-64-192-140-77.telocity.com [64.192.140.77]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0707637B41B; Wed, 1 May 2002 07:53:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (jmills@localhost) by otter.mills-atl.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA01765; Wed, 1 May 2002 10:56:06 -0400 X-Authentication-Warning: otter.mills-atl.com: jmills owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 1 May 2002 10:56:06 -0400 (EDT) From: John Mills X-Sender: jmills@otter.mills-atl.com Reply-To: John Mills To: FreeBSD-questions Cc: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" Subject: NewbieQ on Update (Was: Re: FreeBSD patch level) In-Reply-To: <20020501120505.J75614@wantadilla.lemis.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello - I am going through my first kernel building exercise and would appreciate confirmation or redirection. On Wed, 1 May 2002, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > There's no such thing. You're trying to apply Linux terminology to > FreeBSD. We don't "patch", we update. A RELEASE is just that, a > release, and so it stays the way it is. In the meantime, fixes get > applied to the STABLE branch in the CVS tree. This is all described > in the handbook. I installed FreeBSD-4.5 from 'RELEASE' CDs I made. I am happy with the setup and functionality I got in a _very_ modest (quaint, even) platform: Cyrix-133[?] with 16MBy RAM, c. 3GBy HDD, old CD. This is a 'learner' box, not mission-critical. Now I want to be sure I have a "reasonable" set of fixes, especially security fixes. I used 'cvsup' and the 'standard-supfile' to pull a RELENG_4_5 fileset. Running 'make world' was about a 7-hour project, not counting a number of aborts apparently due to overheating. It finally ran to completion when I took the cover off the box. Time to add more ventilation and move all those cables _away_ from the RAM! My next step is presumably the kernel. My first question is, was this a good tag to achieve what I wanted, or should I have used RELENG_4 (or something else)? My second question is, if I do change to RELENG_4 ("Stable", if I understand), will my system be dramatically different from what I got with 4.5 RELEASE, or what I'll get with RELENG_4_5 ? I've noticed only one peculiarity in my current installation: the HDDs on my primary IDE are found and work properly by interupt, but for some reason the CDROM drive on the secondary is seen as "PIO" - these controllers have IRQs 14 and 15 respectively, according to the BIOS's startup log. My third question is: should this be a kernel configuration issue, a startup configuration issue, or some type of passed parameter at boot? I plan to walk through the steps (including some backups) outlined in the Handbook and the FreeBSD Reference (Thanks, Greg.), but a bit of hand-holding would be appreciated. TIA. - John Mills To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message