The fifth beta of FreeBSD 5.3 is now available for testing: “updated floppy device driver; fix for panics on certain hardware during boot if no media in the CD-ROM drive; change to pf logging format to handle 64-bit time; many more scheduler fixes, we encourage testers to turn PREEMPTION on…” and more.
FreeBSD 5.3-Beta5 Released
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Eugenia Loli
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Does the 5.3 release mark the start of when people should start using the 5.x in servers?
Well, as for my opinion… I would say it’s best to wait for 5.4 (or maybe 5.5) for a serious production servers. There are few things that will need to allow 5.3 to get shake throught vein.
5.3 will be considered -STABLE. That means FreeBSD considers it ready for your server. However, it also means that it’s the equivalent of a “dot.zero” release. For some people this will be stable enough. For others it won’t be.
Do the rest of you have trouble installing the X packages and KDE with this version from CD1? All of the previous releases has all the necessary packages in CD1, but this one seems to be missing some of them. Couldn’t get it installed.
I believe that 5.3 will be considered stable and can/will be used for production. However, FreeBSD will also be issuing a 4.11 release as well. This will give people a chance to slowly migrate over to the new branch.
I prefer to live on the side of (extreme)caution. I am probably going to wait til 5.4. I have been tracking the 5.x series for the last few years and there have been huge improvments with this branch. It is just plain incredible!!! There seems to be a lot of working going on in the 5.3 release. So I believe that I am just going to hold out til approx 5.4 and work with the 4.x/4.11 branch. Just my .02 cents worth.
Disclaimer, I am super-paranoid about which releases get installed. And yes, I have faith in the FreeBSD developers. However, super/exteme paranoia has alot to do with my choice.
PS: the 5.x branch has been in development for the last 5 years and has gone through extensive testing.
These have been the worst quality beta’s I’ve seen for a long time: continually marred by panics and problems for all sorts of people.
I’m sure FreeBSD 4.11 will be fastest and the most stable BSD for uniprocessor machines. You can probably run a server aiming for more than 10years of uptime with 4.11.
These have been the worst quality beta’s I’ve seen for a long time: continually marred by panics and problems for all sorts of people.
*cough* That’s why they’re called beta…
I began using 5.3 with BETA2, and the performance/stability improvement is very good. I tested options PREEMPTION in BETA3, using SHED_4BSD (I’ve been using ULE since 5.1 without any problems btw), but I had two lockups under very heavy load. Since I removed preemption,there wasn’t any problem (in BETA4 and 5). I wonder if the problems causing the lockups are solved by this BETA. What worries me is that one of the primary reasons for switching back to SHED_4BSD was instability of preemption with ULE, but this is exactly what happens with SHED_4BSD as well (at least up to beta3 – will try preemption with 5 later today).
GOOD NEWS: in the case of certain chipsets, floppy didn’t work when acpi was turned on. This problem is now fixed (only beginning with BETA5). ALso, the system seems to be very fast (boots 2x faster than slack on the same machine with approx the same settings – overall speed seems to be a bit faster, but not as spectacular as boot time).
Proberly a stupid question how to turn on preemption.
And is preemtion turned on or off with the final product.
put
options PREEMPTION
in your kernel config file
Note that I’m no expert. I was just curious, and I remembered from linux that preemption might help with latency problems (I think I have those with sound). I thought PREEMPTION is not specifically an option for SMP systems only, yet you’ll find it in the SMP section of:
/usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES
# SMP Debugging Options:
#
# PREEMPTION allows the threads that are in the kernel to be preempted
# by higher priority threads. It helps with interactivity and
# allows interrupt threads to run sooner rather than waiting.
# WARNING! Only tested on alpha, amd64, and i386.
Can someone shed some light on this issue?
have they switched back to ULE being to default again?
No 4BSD is the default for RELENG_5
They will turn ULE back to default again in -CURRENT after 5.3 is released. They might turn ULE back default in RELENG_5 if it gets stable again later.
I recompiled kernel with PREEMPTION (sheduler is 4BSD) and now instead of hard lockups, I got error messages repeatedly (and the OS stopped responding for a few seconds now and then) when downloading files (with roughly 500Kb/s from network shares. Perhaps the same errors would pop up in other circumstances of heavy disk I/O. The message was this:
Sep 20 21:37:59 mcsaba kernel: ad0: WARNING – WRITE_DMA no interrupt but good status
Sep 20 21:38:10 mcsaba kernel: ad0: TIMEOUT – WRITE_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=123095148
Problem went away as soon as I removed options PREEMPTION from my kernel config file.
good work to those working on the FreeBSD kernel team.
My question is when the hell are they going to rid of tha dumb rc.conf file and the random magick that happens on boot. I don’t say sysV init system is the way to go. There’a alternatives. Darwin took FreeBSD user land code and made something nice out of it. Solaris 10 has some cool stuff in the making.
So why is the FreeBSD lagging?
What “random magick” and what’s so dumb about the rc.conf file?
“good work to those working on the FreeBSD kernel team.”
agreed
“My question is when the hell are they going to rid of tha dumb rc.conf file and the random magick that happens on boot. I don’t say sysV init system is the way to go. There’a alternatives. Darwin took FreeBSD user land code and made something nice out of it. Solaris 10 has some cool stuff in the making.
So why is the FreeBSD lagging? ”
….what are you talking about? lol..the RCng init system is fantastic..don’t judge it before you understand it
Like _RaVen said, RCng is fantastic and RCng is what replaced the old init system. It is far better and more clear than SysV and gives you 1 file to configure startup services in. The only issue are those ports that are still not updated to use RCng and rc.conf.
rc.conf is not dumb. I got a whole lot smarter than the rest of the bunch with RCng.