Re: Release Engineering Status Report

On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 06:11 AM, Bruce Evans wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Maxim Konovalov wrote:
>
>> PAE MFC brought an incredible instability to stable branch.  It
>> affects 100% of our user community especially when we issued several
>> SAs since PAE commit.  They often can't switch to RELENG_4_x security
>> branches because even RELENG_4_8 misses several critical non-security
>> fixes.
>
Right, say if still the OpenSSH did or still comes out to be real. Ops, 
now thats
right, we don't have 3.6.1 in STABLE, why ? It was released on April 1, 
does
that not give one enough time to merge this in ? Perhaps someone new is 
needed
then to manage the import of OpenSSH if that is the case, if it is re_at_ 
or other
decision member's of FreeBSD wouldn't allow it, then perhaps its time 
to restructure
that part.... I'm not sure what the case is as other parts of been 
MFC'd lately without
very much testing if any, noting the panic's that have been accruing on 
users running
stable for the past 8 months. Should that just be taken as a sign of 
EoL for RELENG_4 ?

> I merged PAE into my version of -current a bit at a time and didn't
> notice any problems (with PAE not actually configured) despite having
> some large logical inconsistencies from not having all of it.  Most
> of the global changes had no effect since they just changed the names
> of some typedefs without changing the underlying types in the !PAE
> case.  So I suspect that any instabilities in RELENG_4 in the !PAE
> case are indirectly related to PAE and/or localized and thus easy to
> find and fix.

Right the fix(es) should be trivial though incredibly hard to track 
down.
Even more so that FreeBSD no long has anyone that is qualified to do
any real work on the VM system. It is ridicules that re_at_ has allowed PAE
to stay in the STABLE branch for still long with the amount of 
instability that
it has created. I know its just uncovering bugs in the system that have 
always
been present. Now we have many many kernel stack trace's and should be
able to track it down over the next week months.

For now though, the PAE commit should be removed from the RELENG_4 tree.
Anything else should be not excepted  by the FreeBSD community.


-DR