In the next month or two I've got to upgrade a number of servers that
are currently on an EOL'd version of 4-STABLE. I foresee that I'll
have very limited time to do full OS upgrades on these systems in the
coming several years, so I want to make sure I bring them onto an
extended-life branch.
Right now 4.11 has the furthest projected EOL date (Jan 31 2007), and
the projected EOL for 5.3 is several months sooner (Oct 31 2006)
according to <http://www.freebsd.org/security/index.html>
If 5.4 is expected to be an extended-life branch, I would consider
moving them up to 5.4 instead, to get a leap on current technology.
Has that decision been made yet?
-- Clifton
--
Clifton Royston -- cliftonr@tikitechnologies.com
Tiki Technologies Lead Programmer/Software Architect
"I'm gonna tell my son to grow up pretty as the grass is green
And whip-smart as the English Channel's wide..."
-- 'Whip-Smart', Liz Phair
Clifton Royston wrote:> In the next month or two I've got to upgrade a number of servers that > are currently on an EOL'd version of 4-STABLE. I foresee that I'll > have very limited time to do full OS upgrades on these systems in the > coming several years, so I want to make sure I bring them onto an > extended-life branch.My personal recommendation is to put them on FreeBSD 5.3 right now, and to move up to 5.4 when it is released. Minor version upgrades are really easy in FreeBSD -- once I had downloaded the ISO image, it took me all of five minutes to upgrade from FreeBSD 5.3 to 5.4-BETA1. (I have detailed instructions online on doing the 4.8->4.11 upgrade, and I'll put similar instructions online about the 5.3->5.4 upgrade once 5.4 is released.)> If 5.4 is expected to be an extended-life branch, I would consider > moving them up to 5.4 instead, to get a leap on current technology. > Has that decision been made yet?No. The decision will be made around a week after the release, when the security team takes over the branch from the release engineering team. That said, we're currently leaning towards not making 5.4 an extended support branch -- but this will depend largely upon how many more releases there are from the 5.x branch. We are committed to providing extended support for the last release from any major branch, so if you install 5.x now and can perform minor-version upgrades (again, neither difficult nor time consuming) then you can expect security support until at least the second half of 2007. Colin Percival
At 03:33 PM 4/12/2005, Clifton Royston wrote:> If 5.4 is expected to be an extended-life branch, I would consider >moving them up to 5.4 instead, to get a leap on current technology. >Has that decision been made yet?I have a similar dilemma. Currently, I am building all production servers with 4.11. But this means that I can't take advantage of AMD64 processors or some other things that are available in 5.x. And 5.x does some nice things, such as sandboxing BIND by default. Finally, it seems as if CPU manufacturers are rapidly moving toward multiple core processors, which need sophisticated SMP to work well. So, I'd really like to move to 5.4 when it ships. Trouble is, from the reports I'm seeing on the -STABLE list and my own experiments, I don't yet know if 5.4 is going to be as fast (especially at disk access) or stable as 4.11. (Many of the systems I am building will need very fast disk access, because they will be used as database servers and caches.) What's more, here we are at RC2, and there are still a number of open issues, as shown at http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/todo.html So, I am wondering if I should stick with 4.11, favoring fast single CPUs over multiprocessor systems, for production machines -- and then jump to 6.0 when it's released. Will security fixes be available long enough for me to do this if need be? --Brett Glass