freebsd stable - Oct 2005 - General consensus about upgrading from 5.x to 6.x?

I run a very small home office network and domain off of my DSL.  
Currently, I have a FreeBSD 5.4p8 firewall (pf) running.  I am really 
not having any issues, but sometimes the machines gets a bit stodgy for 
no solid reason [load shouldn't be that high].  I have considered the 
jump to 6.0, but I have held back because of the .0 stigma surrounding 
FreeBSD releases.  What do people think in this case?  I have heard that 
6.0 is considered much more stable than later 5.x releases; is this true 
[in context of my usage patterns]?

 How well does the new ULE scheduler (presumably no preemption) play on 
servers in 6.0?

Thanks in advance,

Tom Veldhouse

At 08:59 AM 20/10/2005, Thomas T. Veldhouse wrote:
>I run a very small home office network and domain off of my DSL.
>Currently, I have a FreeBSD 5.4p8 firewall (pf) running.  I am 
>really not having any issues, but sometimes the machines gets a bit 
>stodgy for no solid reason [load shouldn't be that high].  I have 
>considered the jump to 6.0
6.0 is not really like the previous dot zero releases.  6.0 is more 
akin of going from 3.1 to 3.2 as opposed to 4.x to 5.0.  It really is 
quite stable

>How well does the new ULE scheduler (presumably no preemption) play 
>on servers in 6.0?
Stick with the regular scheduler.  ULE is supposed to be fixed, but YMMV

         ---Mike

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-stable@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-
> stable@freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Thomas T. Veldhouse
> Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 08:00
> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
> Subject: General consensus about upgrading from 5.x to 6.x?
> 
> I run a very small home office network and domain off of my DSL.
> Currently, I have a FreeBSD 5.4p8 firewall (pf) running.  I am really
> not having any issues, but sometimes the machines gets a bit stodgy
for
> no solid reason [load shouldn't be that high].  I have considered the
> jump to 6.0, but I have held back because of the .0 stigma surrounding
> FreeBSD releases.  What do people think in this case?  I have heard
that
> 6.0 is considered much more stable than later 5.x releases; is this
true
> [in context of my usage patterns]?
I just upgraded from 5.4 release to 6.0RC1 on my home network (running
Postfix+Amavisd, Apache, etc) and it wasn't too painful.  So far 6.0 has
been great (I have it on a Dell 1850 server as well). My only issue with
the 5.4 upgrade was some wrestling with OpenSSL (had a port installed in
5.4 that 6 didn't seem to like) and dealing with some stuff that was
previously in ports, but is now built in (like portsnap). Once those
nuances were resolved, things worked as expected. I got all my ports
rebuilt via portmanager just to be safe. This was my first upgrade
across major versions and overall it was not too bad.

Based on things I have read here, the 6.0 release cannot be compared to
the 5.0 release in terms of stability, etc. and so far that's held true.

Back up your box and give it a whirl, I think you will like it! =)

Eric

On Oct 20, 2005, at 8:59 AM, Thomas T. Veldhouse wrote:
> I run a very small home office network and domain off of my DSL.   
> Currently, I have a FreeBSD 5.4p8 firewall (pf) running.  I am  
> really not having any issues, but sometimes the machines gets a bit  
> stodgy
the pfSense firewall is based on freebsd 6.  works extremely well.

i have 6.0RC1 on about 4 machines, one dual proc Xeon. all seem to  
run well.  nothing with high load other than the pfSense firewall,  
though.  and that is 100% stable.