Comment Re:Kernel mess (Score 1) 123
Do you ever say anything with any truth in it? The 4.x series was the worst in FreeBSD history as they switched on all the horrible SMP bits. No one used 4.x on anything that required stability.
The 4 series had legendary stability. The 5 series, not so much. I think by 5.3 it was stable enough for some purposes, and by 5.4 things were cleared headed in the right direction again. (How about you create a keyboard binding to output that phrase "Do you ever say anything with any truth in it?" and use the time you save for an itty bitty Google refresher course?) The unusually flaky 5.x releases covered a time period of about 18 months beginning January 2003.
The last 4-STABLE branch release was 4.11 in January 2005 supported until 31 January 2007.
The problem was that the FreeBSD transition to kernel SMP came late in the day, and by 2005 one tended to strongly desire kernel SMP performance levels. Unfortunately, there was a highly inconvenient period where you couldn't enjoy legendary stability and critical-path kernel SMP at the same time. It was a good time to run Linux for some purposes.
I recall that some FreeBSD deployments running 5.3 had spotless stability, but you had to get your build right and then muck with things hardly at all, which I guess went against the grain of some server admins. The 5 series was not a release for these people.
GIANT hung around for a long time on some less critical kernel paths. It was a long, slow excision.
The Linux social contract at the time was that you put your finger in the air to find out what the cool kids were doing, and if you did mostly the same things—for whatever was trending that month—you couldn't go too far wrong. The problem was the different things were trending every six months, so the moment you took your finger out of the air and stopped pumping your feet like a teenaged Fred Flintstone, you'd find yourself running a not-entirely-supported combination of Old Things.
The rate at which The New Hotness decayed into An Old Thing in the Linux community was truly terrifying if you were trying to build a security appliance to be deployed in the worst possible places—places where you might prefer to buy a new ride rather than cross the tracks to fetch your old ride, even a ride barely six months old and custom armored.
Under FreeBSD it remains a good idea to read the release notes and then exercise personal restraint over unsuitable flavours of ice cream. The cool kids algorithm does not work well.
*****
At a very late hour on Prometheus Night, Fred's car glides to a silent stop at the side of a dark road. "What's the matter?" Wilma asks. "My dogs are beat," says Fred. "Rub my feet for a just a minute?" Wilma harrumphs silently to herself for a short moment, but doesn't wish to create a scene. "Well, put your filthy feet up if you must," says Wilma. Fred's hesitates. He had vaguely hoped that Wilma would halfway invert herself under the steering plinth.
Sorry, Fred. Life's not that easy.