From owner-freebsd-stable Wed May 26 10:44:22 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from guru.phone.net (guru.phone.net [209.157.82.120]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 2B04D15538 for ; Wed, 26 May 1999 10:44:19 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@phone.net) Received: (qmail 85766 invoked by uid 100); 26 May 1999 17:44:18 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 26 May 1999 17:44:18 -0000 Date: Wed, 26 May 1999 10:44:18 -0700 (PDT) From: Mike Meyer To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [Q] How stable is FreeBSD 3.X ? In-Reply-To: <19990526100733.B7630@nuxi.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 26 May 1999, David O'Brien wrote: > > I'm not familiar with service packs. However, I can certainly tell the > > difference between doing a "make world" and installing a patch from > > Sun. The patch doesn't change every system binary. > However, with FreeBSD, a future patch will not undo the patch I just > installed. Sun has a history of "dueling" patches when a system binary > has two unrelated problems with it. Patch 1 will fix problem 1, and when > you install patch 2 to fix problem 2 -- guess what! Patch 2 doesn't > include the fix for problem 1. Another difference between them - meaning it's even easier to tell the difference! Sun usually pointed you at the appropriate megapatch after that, though. Which is pretty much a black box. > > and you don't necessarily have to reboot the system as part of the > > process. > But since you don't know if what was patched was something only read at > startup, you always need to reboot a Sun after patching. You may not know - I did. Even things that were only read at startup could generally be dealt with by restarting just the process that read that. Of course, if that process was the kernel or init, you wound up rebooting anyway. And in some cases, the chain of things that depended on that change was complex enough that rebooting was simpler. In any case, I'm paranoid enough that I always rebooted after a patch that touched the system startup code, just so I wouldn't find out that the system startup was now broken when someone rebooted it during my vacation. For yet another difference - not even Sun recommends installing *every* fix. FreeBSD doesn't have any other option. Note that I'm *not* proposing such a system for FreeBSD! Merely pointing out that the differences is very noticable.