Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:29:50 -0500 From: "Dieter BSD" <dieterbsd@engineer.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle Message-ID: <20120117233024.218240@gmx.com>
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Atom writes: > i bought myself a LENOVO T510 when it first came out, around early 2010. > it's got an i5 CPU and Arrandale GPU. it's two years old and on freeBSD i > STILL can't run xorg properly with it. I have a machine from 2005-08 that FreeBSD still doesn't support properly in 2012. After much research I figured out that SATA NCQ was an essential feature, and choose a mainboard with nforce4 to get it. FreeBSD still doesn't support NCQ on nforce after all these years. Linux has had NCQ on nforce4 since Oct 2006. FreeBSD also doesn't properly support the onboard VIA firewire chip, which is still found on new mainboards today. I don't necessarily expect support for every exotic chip out there the first day they hit the street, but these are both popular chips, and it is 6.5 years later. I'm not sure how an OS is supposed to have "The power to serve" when it can't even talk to disks properly. And all the device drivers that think it is ok to lollygag around for absurd lengths of time with interrupts turned off, thus causing data to be lost. Damien writes: > Check this PR I opened some months ago: > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=161123&cat=kern > > It was planned for 9.0-RELEASE, there is no mention of 8.x > That's just the kind of problem John raises here. Hey, at least you have a fix, and it is even in a release (I'm assuming it made it into 9.0). The bigger problem is all the bugs that don't have fixes at all. Igor writes: > patches go ignored (no, I don't have a reference) Here is a PR that contains a patch, yet is still open after several years. Also fixes an even older PR from Dec 2006. Dinky little patch, works great. Should be easy enough to code inspect, test, and check in. http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=127717&cat= Mark writes: > Why is everyone so afraid of running -STABLE? Experience. John writes: > Is three per year an insane schedule ? Remember, I am simultaneously > advocating that FreeBSD stop publishing two production releases > simultaneously, which is almost oxymoronic Why is publishing two production releases almost oxymoronic? Seems like a very good policy to me. Say you are running 8.1. It is good to have the choice of going to a low risk 8.2 with bugfixes or going to 9.0 with some major new feature at the expense of more work and higher risk. If you want the option of sticking with a major release series (say 8.x) for a long time, then there needs to be at least two production releases supported. As fast as major releases are coming out, probably 3 or 4. Why are major releases coming out so often? Gotta compete in the large number war. NetBSD was at 1.x for years and years, then suddenly someone decided to change the numbering scheme and they're off to the races. Firefox has caught the same insanity. I see complaints from medium-to-large sites, yet FreeBSD's budget is so small. Surely it must be possible for these medium-to-large sites to pay into a fund to improve things. FreeBSD clearly needs more developers to fix problems, to code review, test, and check in patches, and to improve the documentation. Judging from this email thread there is a demand for more/better release engineering and backporting as well.
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