Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 14:22:00 -0400 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, Paul Schmehl <pschmehl_lists_nada@tx.rr.com> Subject: Re: challenge: end of life for 6.2 is premature with buggy 6.3 Message-ID: <200806051422.00836.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <CE0D857CF3C54017B29052F0@utd65257.utdallas.edu> References: <9B7FE91B-9C2E-4732-866C-930AC6022A40@netconsonance.com> <200806051023.56065.jhb@freebsd.org> <CE0D857CF3C54017B29052F0@utd65257.utdallas.edu>
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On Thursday 05 June 2008 12:14:20 pm Paul Schmehl wrote: > --On Thursday, June 05, 2008 10:23:55 -0400 John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> > wrote: > > > > FWIW, at Y! 6.3 is more stable than 6.2 (I had a list of about 10 patches for > > known deadlocks and kernel panics that were errata candidates for 6.2 that > > never made it into RELENG_6_2 but all of them are in 6.3). We also have many > > machines with bge(4) and from our perspective 6.3 has less issues with bge0 > > devices than 6.2. > > > > I'm glad to hear that. I have a server that uses bce, and it was completely > non-functional until I hunted down some beta code that made it usable. I'd > like to upgrade, but this is a critical server with no redundancy (and it's a > hobby site with no money to pay for expensive support), and I'm not about to > upgrade unless I know for certain the problems won't reoccur, because I have to > upgrade remotely and pay money if the system goes down. I find that bce(4) is far more reliable in 6.3 than 6.1 for us. There have been several fixes (esp. for higher loads, and mostly in 6.2) to this driver. There are known panics in earlier 6.x that are fixed in 6.3 for certain with this driver. In general though, you don't know which bugs are fixed and if any regressions are present w/o testing the code. If you have production systems then hopefully you have QA systems for development, etc. and you can either reuse those when app QA isn't active for OS QA or you can get dedicated boxes for OS QA. Even if you used a commercial OS with a support contract you would need to do the same. -- John Baldwin
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