Can I get a committer to mark this bug as blocking 6.4-RELEASE ?

[Jo Rhett]

On Nov 26, 2008, at 1:12 PM, Ken Smith wrote:
> Unfortunately no.  As John indicated in the earlier thread BIOS
> issues tend to be extremely hard to diagnose and so far it seems
> like its specific to this one motherboard.
>
> Given this problem does cause issues with installs I'd be willing
> to provide ISOs built at the point we've done the Errata Notice that
> fixes the problem.  But its too nebulous an issue to hold up the
> release itself for.

It does *not* cause an issue with installs.  Installs work fine.  It  
prevents booting an installed operating system.  This appears to  
affect *ALL* of the Intel multi-cpu motherboards, including 3  
generations of Rackable systems.

The only reason it is nebulous is because absolutely nobody bothered  
to investigate the issue.  I've been asking for what information would  
help.  I've offered to setup serial consoles, or even ship systems, to  
anyone who would work on this problem.

This is very big problem that will affect thousands of freebsd servers.

Ken, the complete lack of action taken by FreeBSD to even CONSIDER  
investigating a significant bug reported during the testing process is  
shocking.  And it truly puts a lie to those who continue to claim that  
we should be more active in the testing process.  Every time I have  
done this, I'd found significant issues that affect a significant  
portion of the user base and COMPLETELY prevent deployment of a given  
release, and absolutely nothing has been done to even investigate the  
reports, nevermind address them.

Congradulations.  Good Job.  If you aren't going to accept bug  
reports, why exactly do you release testing candidates at all?

-- 
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source  
and other randomness