freebsd stable - Jun 2008 - challenge: end of life for 6.2 is premature with buggy 6.3

Okay, I totally understand that FreeBSD wants people to upgrade from  
6.2 to 6.3.  But given that 6.3 is still experiencing bugs with things  
that are working fine and stable in 6.2, this is a pretty hard case to  
make.

This is also a fairly significant investment in terms of time and  
money for any business to handle this ugprade.  It totally understand  
obsoleting 5.x now that 7.x is out.  But 6.2 is barely a year old...

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

Jo Rhett wrote:
> Okay, I totally understand that FreeBSD wants people to upgrade from 6.2 
> to 6.3. 
It isn't that we want people to upgrade, it's that we are trying to be 
realistic regarding what we have the resources to support.
> But given that 6.3 is still experiencing bugs with things that 
> are working fine and stable in 6.2, this is a pretty hard case to make.
I admit to not having been following 6.x too closely, but are these 
things that have been reported, or problems you're having personally?
> This is also a fairly significant investment in terms of time and money 
> for any business to handle this ugprade.  
Having an upgrade path is something every operation needs. "Set it and 
forget it" isn't a viable strategy in the current culture where 0-day 
vulnerabilities are becoming increasingly common.

hth,

Doug

-- 

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Jo Rhett wrote:
> Okay, I totally understand that FreeBSD wants people to upgrade from 6.2 
> to 6.3.  But given that 6.3 is still experiencing bugs with things that 
> are working fine and stable in 6.2, this is a pretty hard case to make.
Can you describe the bugs that are affecting you?
> 
> This is also a fairly significant investment in terms of time and money 
> for any business to handle this ugprade.  It totally understand 
> obsoleting 5.x now that 7.x is out.  But 6.2 is barely a year old...
> 
The expectation is always that newer versions of a stable branch will 
have few regressions, and thus upgrading is a low risk.

Scott

Scott Long wrote:
> Jo Rhett wrote:
>> Okay, I totally understand that FreeBSD wants people to upgrade from 
>> 6.2 to 6.3.  But given that 6.3 is still experiencing bugs with things 
>> that are working fine and stable in 6.2, this is a pretty hard case to 
>> make.
> 
> Can you describe the bugs that are affecting you?
> 
>>
>> This is also a fairly significant investment in terms of time and 
>> money for any business to handle this ugprade.  It totally understand 
>> obsoleting 5.x now that 7.x is out.  But 6.2 is barely a year old...
>>
> 
> The expectation is always that newer versions of a stable branch will 
> have few regressions, and thus upgrading is a low risk.
> 
> Scott
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to
"freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
> 
Can just the kernel be upgraded or does all of user space have to be
upgrades to.

How would someone recommend upgrading 500 hundred remote sites spread throughout
the US?

Thanks,
Steve
-- 

"They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety."  (Ben Franklin)

"The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty
decreases."  (Thomas Jefferson)

On Wednesday 04 June 2008 01:20:56 pm Jo Rhett wrote:
> Okay, I totally understand that FreeBSD wants people to upgrade from  
> 6.2 to 6.3.  But given that 6.3 is still experiencing bugs with things  
> that are working fine and stable in 6.2, this is a pretty hard case to  
> make.
> 
> This is also a fairly significant investment in terms of time and  
> money for any business to handle this ugprade.  It totally understand  
> obsoleting 5.x now that 7.x is out.  But 6.2 is barely a year old...
FWIW, at Y! 6.3 is more stable than 6.2 (I had a list of about 10 patches for 
known deadlocks and kernel panics that were errata candidates for 6.2 that 
never made it into RELENG_6_2 but all of them are in 6.3).  We also have many 
machines with bge(4) and from our perspective 6.3 has less issues with bge0 
devices than 6.2.

Given the real world experience I have, your claims of instability w/o even 
testing 6.3 border on silly.  Also, when it comes to bge(4), you need to be 
_very_ specific about what chipsets you are using and comparing those with 
the chipsets in the bug reports you read.  The bge(4) driver in particular 
covers a vast range of different hardware variations and is a bit of a 
hodge-podge itself.  If there is a problem with a 5705 card then it may be 
specific to just 5705 parts and not affect 575x, etc. parts.

Again, with 3ware, there are two different drivers (twe(4) vs twa(4)) and 
again, you need to be more specific with which driver you are using and which 
model controllers you have.

-- 
John Baldwin

On Thursday, June 05, 2008 10:23:55 -0400 John Baldwin
<jhb@freebsd.org>
> wrote:
> I'm glad to hear that.  I have a server that uses bce, and it was
completely
> non-functional until I hunted down some beta code that made it usable. 
I'd
> like to upgrade, but this is a critical server with no redundancy (and
it's a
> hobby site with no money to pay for expensive support), and I'm not
about to
> upgrade unless I know for certain the problems won't reoccur, because I
have to
> upgrade remotely and pay money if the system goes down.
>
> The problems with that driver were bad enough when the server was being
> configured in my study.  (The system would lock up, and only a hard reboot
> would restore networking.)  It would be hell trying to troubleshoot
problems if
> I had to drive the 45 miles to the hosting site and spend a night there
trying
> to get the server back up, then go to work the next day.
>
> # uname -a
> FreeBSD www.stovebolt.com 6.1-RELEASE-p10 FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE-p10 #2: Mon
Oct
> 16 15:38:02 CDT 2006    
root@www.stovebolt.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
> i386
>
> # grep bce /var/run/dmesg.boot
> bce0: <Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B1), v0.9.6> mem
> 0xf4000000-0xf5ffffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci9
> bce0: ASIC ID 0x57081010; Revision (B1); PCI-X 64-bit 133MHz
> miibus0: <MII bus> on bce0
> bce0: Ethernet address: 00:13:72:fb:2a:ad
> bce1: <Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B1), v0.9.6> mem
> 0xf8000000-0xf9ffffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci5
> bce1: ASIC ID 0x57081010; Revision (B1); PCI-X 64-bit 133MHz
> miibus1: <MII bus> on bce1
> bce1: Ethernet address: 00:13:72:fb:2a:ab
>
> # grep bce0 /var/log/messages
> May  2 09:10:31 www kernel: bce0: link state changed to DOWN
> May  2 09:10:39 www kernel: bce0: link state changed to UP
> May 25 07:49:49 www kernel: bce0: link state changed to DOWN
> May 25 07:50:31 www kernel: bce0: link state changed to UP
> May 26 21:28:36 www kernel: bce0: link state changed to DOWN
> May 26 21:28:40 www kernel: bce0: link state changed to UP
> May 27 13:13:21 www kernel: bce0: link state changed to DOWN
> May 27 13:13:31 www kernel: bce0: link state changed to UP
>
> It's been like that since the server was installed.
>
> So, if I upgrade to 6.3 or 7.0, am I still going to experience these
problems?
> Is the server going to stop working entirely?  How can I know that for sure
> before starting an upgrade?
Damn, that's fascinating. I get that with nfe, on my xbox;


amnesiac# uname -a
FreeBSD amnesiac.bayofrum.net 7.0-RELEASE-p1 FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE-p1
#9: Wed May 28 23:14:21 BST 2008
root@amnesiac.bayofrum.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/AMNESIAC  i386


amnesiac# uptime
 6:27PM  up 7 days, 18:53, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.05, 0.06


amnesiac# tail /var/log/messages
Jun  3 17:39:31 amnesiac kernel: pid 37682 (python), uid 80 inumber
871485 on /usr/spare: filesystem full
Jun  4 17:07:24 amnesiac kernel: nfe0: link state changed to DOWN
Jun  4 17:07:34 amnesiac kernel: nfe0: link state changed to UP
Jun  4 17:07:40 amnesiac kernel: nfe0: link state changed to DOWN
Jun  4 17:07:54 amnesiac kernel: nfe0: link state changed to UP
Jun  4 18:39:50 amnesiac kernel: nfe0: link state changed to DOWN
Jun  4 18:40:01 amnesiac kernel: nfe0: link state changed to UP
Jun  4 18:40:07 amnesiac kernel: nfe0: link state changed to DOWN
Jun  4 18:40:21 amnesiac kernel: nfe0: link state changed to UP
Jun  5 18:26:58 amnesiac sudo:    chris : TTY=ttyp0 ;
PWD=/usr/home/chris ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/su


Hm, I swear that's getting more regular. Anyway, it hasn't lost
permanantly yet, but I was just ignoring them (my Linux background
:$). Should I be worried??

I'll provide any other details if anyone's interested.

This thread solves nothing. Two positions are clear.
Also, I recall harder words on openbsd list, with a
lot shorter thread. The whole thing is finished and
should stay in that state. All next posts could be
written, but no need to be sent.
Best regards

                            Zoran

> Zoran Kolic <zkolic@sbb.co.yu> wrote:
>
> This thread solves nothing. Two positions are clear.
> Also, I recall harder words on openbsd list, with a
> lot shorter thread. The whole thing is finished and
> should stay in that state. All next posts could be
> written, but no need to be sent.
Aha, perhaps we need to get Theo in to finish it off!

Chris