2011/10/18 Alex Hornung <ahorn...@gmail.com>: > Hi all, > > for those too lazy to read most of this mail, skip to "In a summary". > > In its current state, 2.12 has fairly major problems in the VM subsystem > that can lead to random bus faults, etc. The underlying issue is that > pages randomly become zero-filled. Symptoms seem to include random full > machine lockups, random bus faults (particularly popular during pkgsrc > building), etc. In my opinion releasing 2.12 like this is a no-go. > > On the bright side, Matt has been working hard on effectively rewriting > the locking of the VM system. The outcome is a huge improvement in > performance and, incidentally, something that fixes most bugs, including > the above. But reality is, as awesome as the changes are, they need > testing, and a lot of it. There is no way we can ship this any time soon > as a release. > > ==== > > In a summary: 2.12 is broken and the fixes for it need plenty of testing > (months of testing). > > There are a few solutions that have been proposed for this, and I'd like > people to vote on them, since we really need to make a decision ASAP: > > A) Scrap the 2.12 release completely (since it's broken anyway and I > don't think releasing something that we know is broken is a good idea) > and simply continue our release schedule with 3.0 some time in the new year. > > B) Revert some of the VM fixes that went into 2.12 that actually made > the problem worse. This also takes time and a lot of testing, but should > make it possible to release something less broken (but still broken) in > about a month's time. > > C) Release 3.0 pretty much now, but risk releasing something broken, > too, since the major VM changes also require major testing - for which > we simply don't have time in this short timeframe. > > D) Release the broken 2.12 and let users "suck it up". > > ==== > > My vote goes to (A). I feel it is the only way to: > 1) avoid shipping broken software (option C and D), and > 2) avoid wasting time on stabilizing something that is already obsolete > (option B).
I vote (A). If not (A) then (C). > > Cheers, > Alex Hornung > Stathis
