Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 15:59:17 +0200 (CEST) From: talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr (Michel TALON) To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Stability Message-ID: <199905251359.PAA00387@niobe.lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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May i add my own story to the instability question? I have run FreeBSD for several years without any problem. I first ran 2.2.5, then upgraded via source to 2.2.8-STABLE, then to 3.0 via the RELEASE cdrom, then via source to 3.1-STABLE and today to 3.2-STABLE. I had never noticed any unexpected reboot. But today my machine paniced TWO times. First while i was upgrading another machine through an NFS mounted /usr/src /usr/obj, my desktop ran out of MBUFS and rebooted. I had done that previously without incurring this penalty. I must confess that i have the stock maxusers 32 but this never previously made such a problem. It seems that now the mbufs consumption is bigger and one needs to increase the 32 which is still in the GENERIC kernel. Needless to say the load on my desktop is small, it is not a high volume server. Second i made a small experiment trying to see wether the floppy problem is still there. Namelly dd something to a write-protected floppy. The answer is still the same, namely instant panic. Of course it is too easy to try to mount a protected floppy and try to write on it. This should never produce a panic. The problem was a bug report but has not been adressed. I should like to comment that such things which where common in old Linux distributions should not occur on the STABLE branch of a serious and efficient system like FreeBSD. I think that correcting such bugs is in my opinion more important that producing 4 releases a year. Of course i understand that Linux makes rapid progress, and closes the gap to FreeBSD, but is it releasing buggy software in the same way as its competitor that BSD is going to catch up? In the past i was tired of the Linux story: upgrade kernel, upgrade modutils, upgrade libc, and so on recursively and was greatly impressed by FreeBSD stability. I would like that this quality remains one of the major diffs with Linux. Best regards to the marvelous team producing the BSD system. -- Michel TALON To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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