I have been hearing a lot of news about freebsd 5.4 being the real 5.x series that the FreeBSS team wants to release and shoud have the features that were left out of 5.3 due to time. I would like to know what are the new features that are going to be available and whether it will be worth the upgrade.

If it's not on FreeBSD's homepage (you know the address right? www.freebsd.org), the answer to your question is simple: nobody knows. Same goes to questions such as "When is Britney Spears new hit being released" or "How will Linus Torvalds name his new pet?". You can download already 5.4-RC3 if you will:

http://www.freebsd.org/news/newsflas...ent20050418:01

or join their mailing list:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...RESOURCES-MAIL

I'd like to know too before I consider upgrading... maybe they'll release the info once the final release comes out.

http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/r...-mar-2005.html

This includes many of them... stuff like: CARP, JDK 1.5.0 support, and more.

But it is not the features, it is the increased stability you should be interested in. One of the main goals of the 5.x tree, at the moment, is to increase speed and stability across the board. 5.3 is good but not good enough in the eyes of the developers... not like I've been able to get it to crash but some have (usually SMP related if my limited recollection of the mailing list in the recent past is correct).

Well I am kind of in two minds as to whether to update my current FreeBSD 5.3 to 5.4 when it is released or to perhaps stick with slackware instead for my laptop. I would definitely be interested if they have merged the vesa 1024 x 768 patch into the tree as I much more of a console person than a GUI person. But the Ati card is not well supported under the default release of 5.3. and hopefully if they have any additions for synaptics mouse pads that would be cool... As far as acpi support, that works fairly well on my machine ... besides my machine is always hooked up to a line so that is not a problem.

Well, upgrading is very easy... it is not like a reinstall or anything. It's a few commands and a wait (of course you can continue to use the system the entire time).

Chances are, if that VESA patch was in the stable tree then it will be in the 5.4 RELEASE. Almost anything in the stable tree is kept in the release unless it causes stability problems.

The thing is, if you already running 5.3 on the laptop then it will be much easier to upgrade then install a new operating system. And you might as well try it out.

I understood that the next 5.X version, 5.4, may have sched_ule enabled, does this mean that the kernel will finally be preemptive? and what does this mean as far as performance?

When is it coming out? I visited these pages http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/schedule.html But didnt make much sense to me. So is it coming out on may 3rd?

Cheers

Thanks for the link there cyto. I had a run through it and yes if the project is on track, 5.4 should be released on May 3rd. I noticed though that the SCHED_ULE module is still incomplete. I would definitely want to look foward to that as I would like to experiment with making my kernel preemptive because of a sound distortion error I have been getting on my laptop.

Think I will wait for reviews though before considering updating. 5.3 is still rock solid on this laptop.