Quality of FreeBSD

[Marc Olzheim]

On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 01:20:49PM +0100, Robert Watson wrote:
> >I know FreeBSD 5 was a strange exception in the relase scheduling and 
> >that a lot has been learned from it for the future and I'm certainly not 
> >unthankful for all the work that's done, but I'd like a clear answer on 
> >what to do now in regard to taking FreeBSD 5 into 'real' production...

[snip]

> In terms of advice:
> 
> If you have a "product" due out more than 3 months from now, I think 6.x 
> is the obvious way to go: you want to be ahead of the curve so that you 
> can have the foundation for your product in sync with the FreeBSD 
> production release cycle, and avoid jumping major releases early in the 
> product life cycle.  6.x has significant performance and stability 
> improvements -- performance especially in the area of file system 
> performance on SMP, preemption, network stack, and memory management, and 
> stability especially in the area of tty support.  By "product", I mean a 
> range of things: the OS foundation of an embedded product such as a 
> firewall or storage appliance, or deployment of an internal product, such 
> as a virtual server product at an ISP.

[snip]

Robert, thanks again for your clear and straight answer. :-)

We fall in the Yahoo-like category of FreeBSD users (in more than one
way) and have been testing a bit with 6.x, just not as heavy as with
5.x.

Since I've already experienced the easy upgrade path before (the way
back to 5.x has been a bit more hairy btw.), it will be easy enough for
me to upgrade some servers to 6.x and start testing that, which is
excatly what I will do.

Because my current 5.x machines have to run with INVARIANTS to be in
production for more than a few seconds, the performance will no doubt be
better anyway. I'll let the debug code enabled on most machines for now
anyhow to possibly provide more useful bug reports. :-)

Thanks again, your answer was of great value to me.

Marc
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