Copyright © 2003 The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team
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This document is now mostly of historical value. It presented a roadmap for the development of FreeBSD's RELENG_5 branch. It was originally written in February 2003 (between the 5.0 and 5.1 releases), and was intended to provide a plan for making the RELENG_5 branch “stable”, both in terms of code quality and finalization of various APIs/ABIs. For a different perspective, the article “Choosing the FreeBSD Version That Is Right For You” may be of interest. The version-guide article was written in August 2005 (two and a half years later), and it contains a section discussing how these plans and events actually unfolded, as well as some lessons learned.
After nearly three years of work, FreeBSD 5.0 was released in January of 2003. Features like the GEOM block layer, Mandatory Access Controls, ACPI, SPARC64® and ia64 platform support, and UFS snapshots, background filesystem checks, and 64-bit inode sizes make it an exciting operating system for both desktop and enterprise users. However, some important features are not complete. The foundations for fine-grained locking and preemption in the kernel exist, but much more work is left to be done. Performance and stability compared to FreeBSD 4.X has declined and must be restored and surpassed.
This is somewhat similar to the situation that FreeBSD faced in the 3.X series. Work on 3-CURRENT trudged along seemingly forever, and finally a cry was made to “just ship it” and clean up later. This decision resulted in the 3.0 and 3.1 releases being very unsatisfying for most, and it was not until 3.2 that the series was considered “stable”. To make matters worse, the RELENG_3 branch was created along with the 3.0 release, and the HEAD branch was allowed to advance immediately towards 4-CURRENT. This resulted in a quick divergence between HEAD and RELENG_3, making maintenance of the RELENG_3 branch very difficult. FreeBSD 2.2.8 was left for quite a while as the last production-quality version of FreeBSD.
Our intent is to avoid repeating that scenario with FreeBSD 5.X. Delaying the RELENG_5 branch until it is stable and production quality will ensure that it stays maintainable and provides a compelling reason to upgrade from 4.X. To do this, we must identify the current areas of weakness and set clear goals for resolving them. This document contains what we as the release engineering team feel are the milestones and issues that must be resolved for the RELENG_5 branch. It does not dictate every aspect of FreeBSD development, and we welcome further input. Nothing that follows is meant to be a sleight against any person or group, or to trivialize any work that has been done. There are some significant issues, though, that need decisive and unbiased action.
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