Re: Release Engineering Status Report

From: Andrew R. Reiter <arr_at_watson.org>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2003 10:55:57 -0400 (EDT)
On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Scott Long wrote:

: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.
:>
:>
:> 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.
:>
:> Bruce
:>
:
:Agreed.  PAE was merged into -stable in three steps.  Backing out the
:third step and leaving the first two steps removes the instability.
:Unfortunately, it was the third step that also was the most complex.
:In any case, we have 2 weeks to find the resolution before the decision
:must be made on keeping or tossing PAE.  Since PAE is a *highly*
:sought after feature, it would be doing a disservice to our user base
:to remove it without putting in some effort to fix it.
:

I fully agree with the last statement here.  One reason my current
employer left FreeBSD 4.x and went to linux for our embedded system was
due to the lack of PAE support.  We were planning to implement the
extensions ourself, but, unfortunately, we in engineering were affected by
time and money issues.

Scott, keep up the good work.

Cheers,
Andrew

--
Andrew R. Reiter
arr_at_watson.org
arr_at_FreeBSD.org
Received on Tue Sep 16 2003 - 05:57:18 UTC

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