Re: FreeBSD's problems as seen by the BSDForen.de community

On 10/01/2008, Dominic Fandrey <kamikaze_at_bsdforen.de> wrote:

> The first problem is the unbearable performance many AMD users are suffering
> for several chipset and CPU generations. Even minimal I/O load on a hard disk
> suffices to lock up whole systems. Posts on the mailinglists current and
> stable have often been answered with denial or have simply been ignored. Only
> on very rare occasions (if at all) have these problems been taken seriously.

This is the thing though. Its working for the developers, its not
working for the users, so how do you think it'll get fixed?

> The second big problem is the handling of regressions. PRs remain unanswered
> or the reporters are told that the regressions they report do not exist. Some
> of our members have even suffered the experience that they developed a patch,
> but it simply was ignored or turned down for the reason that it was a "Linux
> solution". Especially frustrating for those among us who have never looked at
> Linux code.

Whats the PR number?

> The problem seems, in our opinion, to reside with unmaintained code. It seems
> that nobody wants to take responsibility for code that has been untouched for
> a longer period of time. This is quite understandable, considering that
> developers already have projects they're working on and probably consider much
> more important, but that does not make it less of a problem.

I doubt anyone would mind if any of the community there would be
interested in taking over unmaintained code.

> What we think might be a solution to the regression problem, would be the
> establishing of a Regressions Team, similar to other teams like the Security
> Team. The sole purpose of this team would be to take care of regressions that
> concern unmaintained code.

Why would anyone fix the code if they don't care about it?

You've got a group of users who care about regessions in unmaintained
code. Figure out how to work with y'all to develop good quality
solutions to these problems and integrate them back into the FreeBSD
source tree.

> To solve the performance problems it appears to us, that a guide to tracking
> performance problems or a performance test suite is required. This would
> hopefully allow us to write PRs and emails that would be taken more seriously.

Again, if someone there wrote up some performance test suites or built
a testing environment then I'm sure you'll get some help.

The FreeBSD has always been helpful when people willing to develop
have stood up and engaged the community in coming to a solution. So,
are you guys willing to stand up and contribute something towards
solutions to the problems you're seeing?


Adrian


-- 
Adrian Chadd - adrian_at_freebsd.org
(Licence related issues? pish. The project I work on has licencing
issues. FreeBSD is fine.)