Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 13:48:57 -0500 From: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> To: Danny Howard <dannyman@toldme.com> Cc: Bob Johnson <fbsdlists@gmail.com>, John Fox <jjf@mind.net>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems Message-ID: <20051110184857.GA33273@xor.obsecurity.org> In-Reply-To: <20051110180048.GB23887@ratchet.nebcorp.com> References: <20051110012313.GB22149@mind.net> <54db43990511091749h7b7c0753vbf7adbce94eff6cc@mail.gmail.com> <20051110081424.GA46702@xor.obsecurity.org> <20051110180048.GB23887@ratchet.nebcorp.com>
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--lrZ03NoBR/3+SXJZ Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 10:00:48AM -0800, Danny Howard wrote: > On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 03:14:25AM -0500, Kris Kennaway wrote: >=20 > > > As I understand it, 6.0 is primarily concentrating on improving some > > > of the major stuff introduced in 5.x, and shouldn't take nearly as > > > long to become a "stable" platform. Even so, conventional wisdom > > > generally warns against using any X.0 release for critical > > > applications, but that depends on your definition of "critical" and > > > your level of tolerance for excitement. > >=20 > > You really shouldn't think of 6.0 as "like a usual .0 release, so > > handle with care", but more like "5.4 plus extra optimization and > > stability fixes". We spent nearly 6 months during the release cycle > > on stress-testing and fixing stability bugs, and that hard work > > resulted in a lot of fixes to long-standing bugs that have existed > > since FreeBSD 5.x. In addition to the improved stability, performance > > is much better than 5.4 in several areas. > >=20 > > Naturally there may be some regressions, but in the average case 6.0 > > seems to be an outstanding release of FreeBSD no matter what version > > number you give it. >=20 > So ... I am genuinely curious ... if 6.0 is basically 5.4 plus > improvements, why isn't it called 5.5? Because under the hood there are a few large changes to support the performance optimizations (e.g. VFS locking), and some that break compatibility. FreeBSD tries to keep compatibility of interfaces within a -STABLE branch, so if we called it 5.5 we'd have broken that rule. Kris --lrZ03NoBR/3+SXJZ Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (FreeBSD) iD4DBQFDc5YZWry0BWjoQKURAm2BAJ4nfnIINoCwUrLVZjdsnwrIVISq9gCY4D/W v2je+i6Bly656Y8W20MUoA== =shMa -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --lrZ03NoBR/3+SXJZ--
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