From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jun 9 18:34:04 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 703811065678 for ; Mon, 9 Jun 2008 18:34:04 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from peter@wemm.org) Received: from an-out-0708.google.com (an-out-0708.google.com [209.85.132.249]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 30A9A8FC17 for ; Mon, 9 Jun 2008 18:34:03 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from peter@wemm.org) Received: by an-out-0708.google.com with SMTP id b33so549669ana.13 for ; Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:34:03 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.100.213.4 with SMTP id l4mr4102364ang.53.1213034746927; Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:05:46 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.100.154.11 with HTTP; Mon, 9 Jun 2008 11:05:46 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 11:05:46 -0700 From: "Peter Wemm" To: "Joe Kelsey" In-Reply-To: <484CD995.3040002@zircon.seattle.wa.us> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <484CD995.3040002@zircon.seattle.wa.us> Cc: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 6.3-RELEASE versus 5.2-RELEASE X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:34:04 -0000 On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 12:19 AM, Joe Kelsey wrote: > Can anyone verify that some number of bugs related to either a) gmirror, b) > bge and/or c)twe were fixed after the release of 6.3? That is as far as I > can tell the reason that Jo objets to EoL of 6.2, the fact that 6.3 is > unusable due to these late-fixed bugs. I can't speak for gmirror. But I suspect the bigger problem with bge and 3ware is that the drivers attempt to provide coverage for many many variants of hardware. The bge driver covers (at last count) 59 different chips and variants. New variants keep on arriving, with new bugs and new fixes, so our driver requires updates for these *new* chips. There's the catch. The same driver in 6.2 would require the same updates. If Joe's hardware worked with 6.2, it would work with 6.3 as well. The situation is similar with 3ware. There are even two different drivers. twe and twa. twe supports two different hardware interfaces. twa has 4 different hardware interfaces. twa has been getting frequent updates to handle new variations of the 9000 series cards. Again, it seems likely that Joe's hardware would run fine with 6.3-R if it already works with 6.2-R. So far we don't even know which of the 59 variants of bge hardware Jo wants to run with, nor which 3ware driver.. let alone the 3ware variants. I don't recall him mentioning whether it is twe or twa. -- Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5 "If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution." -- Robert Sewell