Re: 8.3 kernel usefull at all?
Hi!
On 07/06/12 22:21, Christoph Egger wrote:
> Is there a reason to keep this basically non-functioning
> kernel around? what are the use-cases for it?
I thought I read somewhere that upstream recommend 8.x as the 'more
stable' kernel series but I can't find this statement now. It should
have security support until 2014 which is longer than estimated for 9.0.
On the contrary, I've chosen to upgrade two systems to 9.0. One of them
is a VM which seemed to run more efficiently at idle with the 9.0 kernel
(due to tickless timer or some other improvements I guess). The other
was real hardware where a bge NIC was buggy in 8.x but seems fixed in
9.0 with some patches from 9-STABLE.
This can work both ways though; sometime a regression might be
introduced in 9.x, and it would be really nice to have the choice to
boot an 8.x kernel ("because we can"), for convenient regression testing
or comparing performance.
I didn't notice anything really important missing userland support when
running 8.3. Lack of pf sounds awkward but fortunately I didn't have
need of it. It seems my netstat works now in 9.0 whereas in 8.3 it
wasn't showing any sockets (affects the buildds too, #663010).
Another reason I initially chose 8.3 for a development machine was so
that it would more closely resemble 8.1 on the buildds, yet I needed the
ZFS v28 support introduced in 8.3.
Maybe if we kept kfreebsd-8, we could at least try to make kfreebsd-9
'the default', by making it first in the d-i GRUB options and debconf
choices. I think squeeze->wheezy upgrades would still default to
kfreebsd-image-8 and end up with 8.3 though, and I'm not sure if that
could be avoided?
Regards,
--
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org
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