On 4/22/06, Mark Cullen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi all, > > Yesterday I managed to make my 4.11 box panic. Since the FreeBSD team > have basically abandoned 4.x support, I think it may be time for me to > either update to 5.x or 6.x, or switch to another O/S. I tried 5.x and > 6.x about 6 months ago and had no luck with those at all, hence why I am > here :-)
6.x should be fine. I had the pleasure of discussing FreeBSD quality assurance with a developer (who stops by on these lists) and am confident it's production-grade. There's a huge magnitude of quality assurance in place, including stress testing which is much more demanding than anything real-world use could reasonably produce. Not to say there aren't bugs, like any system, but they're edge cases and are being fixed. It's a different situation now to pre-5.3 where the system was almost completely unusable, dropping under any load at all. > 2) PF / IPF. I am currently using IPF + natd. When I first tried DF, PF > seemed really quite broken ( or more than likely I just didn't know how > to use it properly. :-) ) > > - Is there anyone here using IPF or PF along with natd? Does it work as > expected now? The main function of the box is going to be NAT / sharing > the internet... You don't need natd, pf can do NAT in the kernel. Active FTP is another matter, but that's pretty simple (DFly caveat: use a locally bound IP OTHER than 127.0.0.1 as the nat target for FTP, its routing logic is different from other BSDs). I have had *one* panic in DragonFly 1.4.3's pf, but I couldn't get gdb to pick up the dump (nor find kgdb which I heard you now need), and found I could work around it by commenting out my normalization line. > 3) Has anyone come across this panic I got on FreeBSD? I think (I have > no idea, just making a semi-educated guess) it might be something VFS / > vnode related? I know you've done alot of VFS work, so if the panic is > related to that I am thinking I probably won't be seeing it, hopefully. A lot of FreeBSD 4's ancient bugs have been fixed in DragonFly, maybe this one too. You won't really know until you stress-test it. I still prefer NetBSD for sheer stability, since it has given me the least bugs of any operating system ever, even if it has extremely sub-optimal SMP. However, what DragonFly does, it does very well, and there's still a lot of improvement left in the todo lists. If you *do* get panics, the team seems to be able to fix any of them within days, provided you present some core or at least a backtrace. The pkgsrc success rate is now very high, almost equal to NetBSD/i386, thanks to a superhuman effort by Joerg. There are still some bugs you'll find in some terminal emulators (I've seen really weird things in aterm, though I don't know if it's actually an aterm issue... SSH via PuTTY et al work fine) but nothing to panic about. -- Dmitri Nikulin
