Re: 8.0-BETA 3 has problems

On Wed, 26 Aug 2009, Dan Allen wrote:

> I just downloaded the 8.0 Beta 3 CD, the regular Intel version.  I tried to 
> install it on my Mac using the Q/Qemu emulator.  All previous versions of 
> FreeBSD since 6.0 and later have worked just fine on this emulator. 
> FreeBSD 7.2 installs and works fine on it, for example.
>
> FreeBSD 8.0 Beta 3 dies in the install.  The resulting installation does not 
> boot and cannot find a kernel.  I do not know anything more than what I have 
> said, and yes, I know that this is not very helpful.  I did a standard 
> install, answered the questions, said "yes I really want to do all of this", 
> the install began, and the next thing I know everything was toasted - the 
> emulator had shut down the process.  When I try and boot it up from the 
> resulting hard disk image, it cannot find a kernel.
>
> Is this really Beta software?  It feels incredibly fragile compared to 
> previous releases of BSD.  I found major problems with 8.0 Beta 2 on a Dell 
> laptop a few weeks ago as well.
>
> I think 8.0 should be held up and not shipped like this.  It will give 
> FreeBSD a bad image.  Just one guy's opinion... (who has shipped a lot of 
> software at Apple and at Microsoft in years past...)

Hi Dan--

This is pretty normal for beta cuts of .0 releases of operating systems.  The 
key observation here is that while you are running into lots of problems, not 
everyone is (or we'd have lots more unhappy developers and users), so we need 
to identify what it is about your setup that's triggering these problems, and 
(a) fix them as well as (b) make sure those conditions are covered as part of 
more general testing so it's not just you finding them.

When you say "the emulator had shut down the process", could you say a bit 
more about that?  Did QEMU crash, or did it report a fatal OS bug and exit 
cleanly?  In either case, did it provide more details about what went wrong? 
It could be that we're dealing with a QEMU bug, or a bug in FreeBSD triggering 
an edge case in QEMU.  If the emulator shuts down, there's not much FreeBSD 
can do, but I guess what's important is whether FreeBSD is behaving 
incorrectly and causing the emulator to fail.

(I'm not sure if QEMU provides trace data when an emulated environment keels 
over, but if it does, that might be quite helpful to have)

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge