FreeBSD 5-STABLE

... is it production quality? I do notice they say Production Release on
the FreeBSD.org page, and 4.10 being legacy, but from experience.. has
anyone had any significant problems? I'd be doing it from a
fresh-install, rather than an upgrade.. and my main concern: How does it
handle heavy load? 200-300Mbit/sec on an em(4) interface. 100MB/sec
disk access, spawned across several drives (either through ccd, or
RAIDframe.. never had much luck with high performance under vinum).

Thanks!

Kristofer

Kristofer Pettijohn writes:

> .. is it production quality?

Yes.

> I do notice they say Production Release
> on the FreeBSD.org page, and 4.10 being legacy, but from
> experience.. has anyone had any significant problems?

Some people have, of course, but in general it's a step forward. If
your system is currently running fine and you don't want to keep up
with the latest application updates, it's probably not worth upgrading
the system now. Otherwise, feel free to go for it.

> I'd be doing it
> from a fresh-install, rather than an upgrade..

That's the right decision.

> and my main concern:
> How does it handle heavy load? 200-300Mbit/sec on an em(4) interface.
> 100MB/sec disk access, spawned across several drives (either through
> ccd, or RAIDframe.. never had much luck with high performance under
> vinum).

Since you're not using vinum, you're not likely to see much
difference. The em driver seems to have been pulled out of the
monolithic kernel lock, but if you're heavily I/O bound that may give
you only marginal improvement.

--
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer
http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/