Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 12:31:33 +0530 From: Subhro <subhro.kar@gmail.com> To: John Gillis <zefram@zefram.net> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Compiling 4-RELEASE on 5-STABLE Message-ID: <b2807d0404101400011e9774e8@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20041014011057.P22475@dante.zefram.net> References: <20041014000024.T27161@dante.zefram.net> <b2807d0404101321223f96161e@mail.gmail.com> <20041014011057.P22475@dante.zefram.net>
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On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 01:18:25 -0400 (EDT), John Gillis <zefram@zefram.net> wrote: >however.. there are still things that could go wrong and I > prefer not to find out when a production server heads south or doesn't > have the right firmware on the RAID card.. so that's why I lag. You can very well lag but doing so you would be creating apain in your forehead. Because everything that worked on 4.X-Release ( repeat, notice the word release) will also work on 5.Y-Release ( notice the word release). And also I would argue against keeping your boxes in the 4.X tree because as new releases are made available, the source codes of the ports are also changed to make it portable to the new tree. Most of the times tyhey DO compile on the old tree but you would be loosing features and performance. For example, there is a huge difference in performance when Xorg is compiled on gcc 2.95 and on gcc 3.4.2. If you are interested then contact me off the list. I would be happy to send you the performance monitor logs. > Also, at least one piece of hardware is near impossible to > upgrade. An old 486/25 that's running Snort, without a cd-rom and a 200M > hard drive. Negative, this hardware is also upgradable. Just the catch is it is not SELF upgradable. I mean you can expect to compile the tree on the 486 itself. But you can very well compile its tree and kernel on a Pentium (say) and install it on the 200M harddisk. I have quite a few routers which have a lot similar configuration to yours and they work till date without complaining. Just the upgradng is a bit troublesome compared to the newer systems. Refer to the CFLAGS parameter in man make.conf > What about my question about boot strapping? Does that ensure that > I could compile the world/kernel of 4.x on 5.3? > John No it does not. To be precise as far as I know, there is no way you can compile a native 4.X binary of any kind (application, kernel, bootstrap, you name it) on a 5.X box. Although you CAN run native 4.X binaries on a 5.X kernel using the compatibility layers. Refer to /usr/src/sys/NOTES for further information about compiling the compatibility layers. And yes the boot strap code has also changed from 4.X. Refer to /usr/src/UPDATING for a brief log about what had been changed since the 4.X tree. Also you can find detailed information about upgrading a 4.X tree to a 5.Y tree (although not recommended for other performance, security and a number of other reasons). Regards S. -- Subhro Sankha Kar School of Information Technology Block AQ-13/1 Sector V ZIP 700091 India
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