Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 20:09:26 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org> To: Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: is THIS why the 6.2 release seems stalled ? Message-ID: <20070110180926.GA9040@kobe.laptop> In-Reply-To: <ef10de9a0701092248p2b648d9bgf63471bb6e4bec@mail.gmail.com> References: <45A2805E.7060000@ccstores.com> <20070109222558.GA75695@xor.obsecurity.org> <ef10de9a0701091507s2ed7c15v1df6131dfa8c58f7@mail.gmail.com> <20070110051608.GB80575@xor.obsecurity.org> <ef10de9a0701092248p2b648d9bgf63471bb6e4bec@mail.gmail.com>
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On 2007-01-10 00:48, Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton@gmail.com> wrote:
>On 1/9/07, Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> wrote:
>>On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 05:07:08PM -0600, Nikolas Britton wrote:
>>> Why then?
>>
>> Various administrative delays, mostly. e.g. the main ftp distribution
>> server had hardware failure for a few weeks.
>
> Shit happens and we did just change out the core team, specifically
> the release engineering team... so that's understandable...
You are mixing the Core team with the Release Engineering team. They
are two separate entities, even though they work closely together.
> I guess my comment was mainly targeted at the general state of affairs
> for the last two years.
By following the thread, I can see that you have been having serious
problems with your FreeBSD installations. It is understandable that a fair
amount of aggravation has resulted from the problems you are describing,
and it is more than understandable that you feel "Someone Ought to(TM)" fix
these problems.
Several of the posted messages have come out as very wrong though, not
because you don't have a point, but because it's hard to discern from what
you write what the point really *is*.
You wrote, for example, that 6.2-RELEASE has been delayed, and assumed that
this was because of the Gentoo/FreeBSD blog post you have read. There _is_
a reason why 6.2-RELEASE has been delayed, but it is *not* related to
Gentoo/FreeBSD -- as you already know by now.
The rest of the bullet items you posted about (Xen Dom0 support; SATA RAID
driver problems; better chipset support for new 51xx Xeon and Core 2 Duo
systems; ZFS support; better support for 2TB, or greater, RAID arrays;
speed up GigE and 10GigE stuff; better SMP support; GIANT lock in RAID/LAN
drivers) are not really *blockers* for pushing out 6.2-RELEASE, right?
There are literally hundreds of improvements going in the HEAD of the CVS
tree every month, but not all of them can be easily backported to the
RELENG_6 branch. As you know (being a long-time FreeBSD user), the
developer team tries to merge changes from HEAD to the STABLE branch, but
the team tries to keep a pretty thin balance between two fairly divergent
lines of development:
* Merging useful and cool new stuff, but, at the same time,
* Avoid breaking backwards compatibility on STABLE branches
A lot of the bullet items you have mentioned have been the subject of a
great deal of work, and some of them are giving extremely fruitful results
in the HEAD branch of CVS (what is going to become 7.0-RELEASE). Not all
of them _can_ be ported to RELENG_6 without breaking API and ABI
compatibility in one or more ways though.
Even so, the 6.2-RELEASE includes a lot of improvements from 6.1.
More improvements, are scheduled for later releases. For example, some of
the areas of 7.0-CURRENT which have seen an outstanding set of fixes, speed
improvements, locking & SMP support improvements, and feature enhancements
are:
* ZFS support (feature). Pawel Jakub Dawidek has successfully ported ZFS
to FreeBSD, and he delivered an imporessive demo at EuroBSD Con 2006,
in November 2006.
* FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT includes already an astounding set of locking and
SMP improvements over STABLE, and it performs quite nicely on some of
the Intel Core 2 Duo systems which I have tested.
* The network stack of 7.0-CURRENT has been improved even more, with many
drivers being updated to support a larger array of NIC hardware, with
performance and throughput improvements, and a lot more changes which I
can't even remember off-hand.
Projects in progress include:
* Support for Xen.
* Netperf: The netperf team targets performance monitoring and throughput
performance analyses of FreeBSD. The project maintains parts of the
official FreeBSD web site, at http://www.freebsd.org/projects/netperf/,
where you can find out more about what the team is doing, get progress
reports, etc.
* Java on FreeBSD, http://www.freebsd.org/java/index.html
The FreeBSD Java project and the FreeBSD Foundation have been working
on delivering Java support on FreeBSD for a long time. The FreeBSD
Foundation has successfully negotiated a license with Sun, and they can
now deliver binary Java distributions[1]. Patch sets for Java 1.5.X
have been announced too.
[1] http://www.freebsd.org/java/newsflash.html
The active projects are al listed at http://www.freebsd.org/projects/ and
that list isn't even complete! So the comment by Kris Kennaway below is
the best way to phrase it, IMHO:
>> Some of these are already there, some are in progress, etc.
>
> I haven't been keeping track lately but that's good if true. Will see
> what happens when I upgrade my servers.
Great! :)
> I am unhappy but I care too much about FreeBSD to just up and leave, it
> may be time for a sabbatical though...
Or, alternatively, it may be the time to sit down and think which parts of
FreeBSD you have an interest in, and really consider helping improve them.
You already know that we can use all the help we can get, so if you can
offer any substantial amount of help, feel free to get more actively
involved :)
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