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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!news.Stanford.EDU!microunity!usenet From: deborah@gallifrey.microunity.com (Deborah Gronke Bennett) Subject: Re: Should I upgrade to 2.1? In-Reply-To: Doug Lerner's message of 20 Dec 1995 03:00:39 GMT Message-ID: <oqoht3dq38.fsf@gallifrey.microunity.com> Sender: deborah@gallifrey.microunity.com Organization: MicroUnity Systems Engineering, Inc. X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.1 References: <4b7u8n$si3@gol2.gol.com> Date: Thu, 21 Dec 1995 03:59:39 GMT Lines: 46 In article <4b7u8n$si3@gol2.gol.com> Doug Lerner <doug@gol.com> writes: I have always been of the school of thought that says, "if it works, don't fix it." My FreeBSD 2.05 has been working flawlessly since I installed it back in the summer. It handles all the news and mail for my BBS. Is there any reason I should upgrade it to 2.1? I have found two bugs that will motivate me to upgrade at least some of my machines to 2.1 in hopes that they have been fixed (discussion with the FreeBSD-bugs mailing list suggests I won't be disappointed). 1) I am writing a device driver for an ISA card that we are using internally in our FreeBSD machines. For many good reasons, we have a /usr/src/sys tree checked into CVS, and I build my kernels from there rather than on /usr/src/sys on a given machine. If I check the bsd/sys tree out into my home directory (which is on an auspex fileserver) and try to config and build a kernel from there, I run into some problems with permissions with /tmp, and then I run into an already-reported problem where a random disk block disappears from my target file. Result - make depend falls over mysteriously. Move the bsd/sys tree to a local filesystem on the FreeBSD box and everything works fine. 2) All our lab machines are identical, so I didn't install XFree86 on all of them - I installed one copy on the /usr/local partition for FreeBSD which is really located on (surprise) an auspex fileserver. When I try to run startx, the FreeBSD kernel falls over with a panic in the vnode system. Install XFree86 on the local disk and startx runs fine, so does the X server. Of course, if I never used NFS and I wasn't in a company that used auspex fileservers, I might never have found these problems. But you did ask if there was >any< reason you should upgrade. -deborah bennett -- ---------- Deborah Gronke Bennett (WD5HJH) kernel and device drivers engineer deborah@microunity.com (408)-734-8100 MicroUnity Systems Eng., 255 Caspian Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1015 USA