d/freebsd-skq
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull Requests Packages Projects Releases Wiki Activity

MFP4: Add the "Early Adopter's Guide to FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE"

Browse Source 
from the releng Perforce repository.  (Not hooked up to the RELNOTESng
build yet.)

	Makefile#1
	article.sgml#6

Reviewed by:	re
This commit is contained in:
bmah 2002-10-25 21:29:00 +00:00
parent 70f2b22f03
commit 074c723543
2 changed files with 432 additions and 0 deletions
Show Stats Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

14
release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/early-adopter/Makefile Normal file
View File

@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
# $FreeBSD$
DOC?= article
FORMATS?= html
INSTALL_COMPRESSED?=gz
INSTALL_ONLY_COMPRESSED?=
SRCS= article.sgml
DOC_PREFIX?= /usr/doc
.include "${DOC_PREFIX}/share/mk/doc.project.mk"

418
release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/early-adopter/article.sgml Normal file
View File

@ -0,0 +1,418 @@
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//DTD DocBook V4.1-Based Extension//EN" [
<!ENTITY % man PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//ENTITIES DocBook Manual Page Entities//EN">
%man;
<!ENTITY % freebsd PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//ENTITIES DocBook Miscellaneous FreeBSD Entities//EN">
%freebsd;
<!ENTITY % authors PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//ENTITIES DocBook Author Entities//EN">
%authors;
<!ENTITY % teams PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//ENTITIES DocBook Team Entities//EN">
%teams;
<!ENTITY % mailing-lists PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//ENTITIES DocBook Mailing List Entities//EN">
%mailing-lists;
]>
<article>
<articleinfo>
<title>Early Adopter's Guide to FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE</title>
<authorgroup>
<corpauthor>The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team</corpauthor>
</authorgroup>
<pubdate>$FreeBSD$</pubdate>
<copyright>
<year>2002</year>
<holder role="mailto:re@FreeBSD.org">The FreeBSD Release
Engineering Team</holder>
</copyright>
</articleinfo>
<section>
<title>Introduction</title>
<para>FreeBSD 5.0 marks the first new major version of FreeBSD in
over two years. Besides a number of new features, it also
contains a number of major developments in the underlying system
architecture.
Along with these advances, however, comes a system that
incorporates a tremendous amount of new and not-widely-tested
code. Compared to the existing line of
4.<replaceable>X</replaceable> releases, 5.0 may have regressions
in areas of stability, performance, and occasionally
functionality.</para>
<para>For these reasons, the &a.re; does <emphasis>not</emphasis>
encourage users to blindly update from older FreeBSD releases to
5.0. Specifically, for more conservative users, we recommend
running 4.<replaceable>X</replaceable> releases (such as
4.7-RELEASE or the upcoming 4.8-RELEASE) for the near-term
future. We feel that such users are probably best served by
upgrading to 5.<replaceable>X</replaceable> only after a
5-STABLE development branch has been created; this may be around
the time of 5.1-RELEASE or 5.2-RELEASE.</para>
<para>(FreeBSD 5.0 suffers from what has been described as a
<quote>chicken and egg</quote> problem. The entire project has
a goal of producing a 5.0-RELEASE that is as stable and reliable
as possible. This stability and reliability requires widespread
testing, particularly of the system's newer features. However,
getting a large number of users to test the system, in a
practical sense, means building and distributing a
release first!)</para>
<para>This article describes some of the issues involved in
installing and running FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE. We begin with a
brief overview of the FreeBSD release process. We then present
some of the more noteworthy new features in FreeBSD 5.0, along
with some areas that may prove troublesome for unwary users.
For those users choosing to remain with 4-STABLE-based releases,
we give some of the short- to medium-term plans for this
development branch. Finally, we present some notes on upgrading
existing 4.<replaceable>X</replaceable> systems to 5.0.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>An Overview of the FreeBSD Release Process</title>
<para>FreeBSD employs a model of development that relies on multiple
development branches within the source code repository. The main branch is called
<quote>CURRENT</quote>, and is referred to in the CVS repository
with the <literal>HEAD</literal> tag. New features are
committed first to this branch; although this means that CURRENT
is the first to see new functionality, it also means that it
occasionally suffers from breakages as new features are
added and debugged.</para>
<para>Most FreeBSD releases are made from one of several
<quote>STABLE</quote> branches. Features are only added to
these branches after some amount of testing in CURRENT. At the
moment, only one STABLE branch is under active development; this
branch is referred to as <quote>4-STABLE</quote>, and all of the
FreeBSD 4.<replaceable>X</replaceable> releases were based on
it. This branch has the tag <literal>RELENG_4</literal> in the
CVS repository.</para>
<para>FreeBSD 5.0 will be based on the CURRENT branch. This
will be the first release from this branch in over two years (the
last was FreeBSD 4.0, in March 2000).</para>
<para>At some point after the release of FreeBSD 5.0, a
<quote>5-STABLE</quote> branch will be created in the FreeBSD
CVS repository with the branch tag <literal>RELENG_5</literal>.
The past two stable branches (3-STABLE and 4-STABLE) were
created immediately after their respective <quote>dot-oh</quote>
releases (3.0 and 4.0, respectively). In hindsight, this
practice did not give sufficient time for either CURRENT or the new
STABLE branches to stabilize after the new branches were
created.</para>
<para>Therefore, the release engineering team will only create the
5-STABLE branch in the CVS repository after they have found a
relatively stable state to use as its basis. It is likely that
there will be
multiple releases in the 5.<replaceable>X</replaceable> series
before this happens; we estimate
that the 5-STABLE branch will be created sometime after
5.1-RELEASE or 5.2-RELEASE.</para>
<para>More information on FreeBSD release engineering processes can be found
on the <ulink
url="http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/index.html">Release
Engineering Web pages</ulink> and in the FreeBSD <ulink url="http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/releng/index.html">Release
Engineering</ulink> article.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>New Features</title>
<para>A large attraction of FreeBSD 5.0 is a number of new
features. These new features and functionality generally involve
large architectural changes that were not feasible to port back to
the FreeBSD 4-STABLE development branch. (By contrast, many
self-contained enhancements, such as new device drivers or
userland utilities, have already been ported.) A brief, but not
exhaustive list includes:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>SMPng: The <quote>next generation</quote> support for
SMP machines (work in progress). There is now partial
support for multiple processors to be running in the kernel
at the same time.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>KSE: Kernel Scheduled Entities allow a single process
to have multiple kernel-level threads, similar to Scheduler
Activations.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>New architectures: Support for the sparc64 and ia64
architectures, in addition to the i386, pc98, and
alpha.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>GCC: The compiler toolchain is now based on GCC
3.<replaceable>X</replaceable>, rather than GCC
2.95.<replaceable>X</replaceable>.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>MAC: Support for extensible, loadable Mandatory Access
Control policies.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>GEOM: A flexible framework for transformations of disk
I/O requests. An experimental disk encryption facility has
been developed based on GEOM.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>FFS: The FFS filesystem now supports background
&man.fsck.8; operations (for faster crash recovery) and
filesystem snapshots.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>UFS2: A new UFS2 on-disk format has been added, which
supports extended per-file attributes and larger file
sizes.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Cardbus: Support for Cardbus devices.</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>A more comprehensive list of new features can be found in
the release notes for FreeBSD 5.0.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Drawbacks to Early Adoption</title>
<para>Along with the new features of FreeBSD 5.0 come some areas
that can cause problems, or at least can lead to unexpected
behavior. Generally, these come from the fact that a number of
features are works-in-progress. A partial list of these
areas of difficulty includes:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>A number of features are not yet finished. Examples
from the feature list above include SMPng and KSE.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Because of changes in kernel data structures and
ABIs/APIs, third-party binary device drivers will require
modifications to work correctly under FreeBSD 5.0.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Several parts of FreeBSD's base system functionality
have been moved to the Ports Collection. Notable examples
include <application>Perl</application>,
<application>UUCP</application>, and most (but not all)
games. While these programs are still supported, their
removal from the base system may cause some confusion.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>A number of ports and packages do not build or do not
run correctly under FreeBSD 5.0, whereas they did under FreeBSD
4-STABLE. Generally these problems are caused by compiler
toolchain changes or cleanups of header files.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Because FreeBSD 5.0 is the first release from the
CURRENT branch in over two years, many of its features are
seeing wide exposure for the first time. Many of these
features (such as SMPng) have broad impacts on the
kernel.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>A certain amount of debugging and diagnostic code is
still in place to help track down problems in FreeBSD 5.0's new
features. This may cause FreeBSD 5.0 to perform more slowly
than 4-STABLE.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Features are only added to the 4-STABLE development
branch after a <quote>settling time</quote> in -CURRENT.
FreeBSD 5.0 does not have the stabilizing influence of a
-STABLE branch. (It is likely that the 5-STABLE development
branch will be created sometime after 5.1-RELEASE or
5.2-RELEASE.)</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>Because a number of these drawbacks affect system stability, the
release engineering team recommends that more conservative sites
and users stick to releases based on the 4-STABLE branch until
the 5.<replaceable>X</replaceable> series is more polished.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Plans for the 4-STABLE Branch</title>
<para>The release of FreeBSD 5.0 does not mean the end of the
4-STABLE branch. There will be at least one more release on
this branch, namely 4.8-RELEASE, currently scheduled for 1
February 2003.</para>
<para>As of this writing, the release engineering team has no
definite plans for future releases (past 4.8) on the 4-STABLE
branch. However, a 4.9-RELEASE or even a 4.10-RELEASE are
likely possibilities. Any future releases from this branch will
depend on several factors. The most important of these
is the existence and stability of the 5-STABLE branch. If
CURRENT is not sufficiently stable to allow the creation of a
5-STABLE branch, this may require and permit more releases from
the 4-STABLE branch. Until the last declared release
on the 4-STABLE branch, new features may be merged from HEAD at
the discretion of developers, subject to existing release
engineering policies.</para>
<para>To some extent, the release engineering team will take into
account user demand for future 4-STABLE releases. This demand,
however, will need to be balanced with release engineering
resources (in terms of personnel, computing resources, and mirror
archive space).</para>
<para>The &a.security-officer; will continue to support releases
made from the 4-STABLE branch in accordance with their published
policies, which can be found on the <ulink
url="http://www.FreeBSD.org/security/index.html">Security
page</ulink> on the FreeBSD web site. Generally, the two most
recent releases from any branch will be supported with respect
to security advisories and security fixes. At its discretion,
the team may support other releases.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Notes on Upgrading</title>
<para>For those users with existing FreeBSD systems, this section
offers a few notes on upgrading a FreeBSD
4.<replaceable>X</replaceable> system to
5.<replaceable>X</replaceable>. As with any FreeBSD upgrade, it
is crucial to read the release notes and the errata for the
version in question, as well as
<filename>src/UPGRADING</filename> for source upgrades.</para>
<section>
<title>Binary Upgrades</title>
<para>Probably the most straightforward approach is that of
<quote>backup everything, reformat, reinstall, and restore
everything</quote>. This eliminates problems of incompatible
or obsolete executables or configuration files polluting the
new system.</para>
<para>As of this time, the binary upgrade option in
&man.sysinstall.8; has not been well-tested for
cross-major-version upgrades. Using this feature is not
recommended.</para>
<para>On the i386 and pc98 platforms, a UserConfig utility
exists on 4-STABLE to allow boot-time configuration of ISA
devices when booting from installation media. Under FreeBSD
5.0, this functionality has been replaced in part by the
&man.device.hints.5; mechanism (it allows specifying the same
parameters, but is not interactive).</para>
<para>Floppy-based binary installations may require downloading
a third, new floppy image holding additional device drivers
in kernel modules. This <filename>drivers.flp</filename>
floppy image will generally be found in the same location as
the usual <filename>kern.flp</filename> and
<filename>mfsroot.flp</filename> floppy images.</para>
<para>CDROM-based installations on the i386 architecture now use
a <quote>no-emulation</quote> boot loader. This allows, among
other things, the use of a <literal>GENERIC</literal> kernel,
rather than the stripped-down kernel on the floppy images. In
theory, any system capable of booting the Microsoft Windows NT
4 installation CDROMs should be able to cope with the FreeBSD
5.0 CDROMs.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Source Upgrades</title>
<para>Reading <filename>src/UPDATING</filename> is absolutely
essential. The section entitled <quote>To upgrade from
4.x-stable to current</quote> contains a step-by-step update
procedure. This procedure must be followed exactly, without
using of the <quote>shortcuts</quote> that some users
occasionally employ.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Common Notes</title>
<para><application>Perl</application> has been removed from the
base system. The recommended way of installing Perl is either
from a pre-built package or from the Ports Collection.
Building Perl as a part of the base system created a number of
difficulties which made updates problematic.
The base system utilities that used Perl have either
been rewritten (if still applicable) or discarded (if
obsolete).</para>
<para>It is generally possible to run old
4.<replaceable>X</replaceable> executables under
5.<replaceable>X</replaceable>, but this requires the
<filename>compat4x</filename> distribution to be installed.
Thus, using old ports <emphasis>may</emphasis> be
possible.</para>
<para>When installing or upgrading over the top of an existing
4-STABLE-based system, it is extremely important to clear out
old header files in <filename>/usr/include</filename>.
Renaming or moving this directory before a binary installation
or an <literal>installworld</literal> is generally
sufficient. If this step is not taken, confusion may result
(especially with C++ programs) as the compiler may wind up
using a mixture of obsolete and current header files.</para>
</section>
</section>
<section>
<title>Summary</title>
<para>While FreeBSD 5.0 contains a number of new and exciting
features, it may not be suitable for all users at this time. In
this document, we presented some background on release
engineering, some of the more notable new features of the 5.0
series, and some drawbacks to early adoption. We also presented
some future plans for the 4-STABLE development branch and some
tips on upgrading for early adopters.</para>
</section>
</article>