# Comments on "FreeBSD 9.0-BETA1 Available"



## sossego (Aug 6, 2011)

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=25513

Strange, I've been using Whitehorn's versions of 9.0 since last April. After kernel rebuilding and a few tweaks, they are quite stable to me.

Wait, I'm using Tier2 architectures.

Silly me.


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## d_mon (Aug 6, 2011)

can i use it? [kinda newbie on BSD]

i do not want to format 'every 6 months' like buntus!

it is possible to maintain 'update' with few commands? {type rolling release}


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## sossego (Aug 6, 2011)

Why?
No, really, why do you want to use CURRENT or BETA and not RELEASE?

I have a few machines with CPUs that are not supported 100%- See  http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/committers-guide/archs.html for a better explanation- by the project; this is one reason why I use CURRENT.


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## UNIXgod (Aug 6, 2011)

d_mon said:
			
		

> can i use it? [kinda newbie on BSD]
> 
> i do not want to format 'every 6 months' like buntus!
> 
> it is possible to maintain 'update' with few commands? {type rolling release}



Unless your interested in testing you shouldn't run it on production. If you have a machine and just want to play... go for it. If not wait for it to be done.( in fact most people running production servers wait for a point release like 9.1 just to be sure)


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## xibo (Aug 6, 2011)

I will give it a try once STABLE is created in a few weeks, because I can't wait to get shared semaphores but on the other hand don't want to use a premature OS either.


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## sossego (Aug 6, 2011)

I wouldn't say that the 9.0 CURRENT is premature. Whitehorn, Grehan, Hibbits, members such as Tingo, and quite a few of the hackers and the developers of different projects are making it a constantly more stable release before it is branded as RELEASE. 
I'll vie for the fact that 9.0 CURRENT on PowerPC outperforms Debian in many areas. An OpenBSD member helped with a temporary solution to mouse grabbing on PowerPC machines. The Qemu developer group and Nox have been helpful and informative with Qemu on SPARC64. FreeBSD GNOME allowed me to try porting GNOME 3 to PowerPC and SPARC 64; the status is not ready due to some code and me being busy somewhat. FreeBSD KDE has allowed me to build KDE on both platforms mentioned with only PowerPC being successful.
Small ports such as xxxterm- killasmurf86's port- have made it easier to look up information when the system cannot handle memory and CPU stress/overload/waste from Firefox.


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## gkontos (Aug 6, 2011)

The more people try it the more stable it becomes. If we all waited for 9.1-RELEASE then there would never be one!

That said, I am not urging anyone to use 9.0-BETA1 for their high critical production servers. That would be silly. But for desktop and SOHO use, those who followed 8.2-STABLE can safely upgrade and help the community by doing some debugging.


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## xibo (Aug 14, 2011)

I installed it on a test system earlier today, updated source to most recent version and recompiled everything with clang and CPUTYPE?=westmere, resulting in a nonworking userland (shell-autocompletion, gcc, and cvsup would crash with SIGBUS). Chrooting into the BETA-1 rescue system of the USB image would get me a working shell, cvsup and gcc so it's definately an userspace error rather then a kernel one.
I'll rebuild without CPUTYPE, hope that's the cause.


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## fonz (Aug 14, 2011)

d_mon said:
			
		

> can i use it? [kinda newbie on BSD]


You can, *but* you should keep in mind that it is a beta - or test version. There might still be problems with it, which you are encouraged to report (and, if you can, even propose a fix for). That's what betas are for.



			
				d_mon said:
			
		

> i do not want to format 'every 6 months' like buntus!


Since 9.0-BETA1 is exactly that - a beta - you shouldn't hang on to it. It's not much more than a snapshot.

Reformatting is rarely needed between updates (that's what Microsoft is for), but both -STABLE and -CURRENT will require that you regularly recompile the system. Beta versions and release _candidates_ are for testing and not meant to be kept around.

Judging from your previous posts, I recommend you stick to -RELEASE (currently 8.2-RELEASE, 9.0-RELEASE is in the pipeline) versions of FreeBSD until you gain more understanding of the system.

Fonz


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## xibo (Aug 16, 2011)

Rebuilding everything without CPUTYPE fixed the SIGBUSes for me. Most of the base is working here, with a noteworthy exception of the nfs-server. The FreeBSD-9's nfs-client can connect to FreeBSD-8's nfs servers, but the new server can't be connected to neither by the old client nor by the new one (and it's not a clang bug this time).

It seems others also have issues with it, according to the mailing list.


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## olav (Aug 16, 2011)

For me STABLE is stable. I've had more stability issues with RELEASE than STABLE. I don't recompile STABLE every day either, its more like "once in a while".


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