I decided to take advantage of this three days week-end (at least in France)
to upgrade the Notebook to FreeBSD 6.0-BETA2 and follow the RELENG_6 branch testing
the upcoming FreeBSD release.
In fact, i hope this one may help me in two areas... more precisely: fix a
very annoying bug resulting in a USB interrupt storm and help on the wifi side,
based on the work done to incorporate the wpa_supplicant code from
ports(7).
The installation went smooth and well, although there is no package yet (it
is a beta release, not a release candidate) and all third party need to be
compile from sources. So, i installed the minimum required. In the same time,
update (one more time) the installation notes, notably regarding the DHCP part (this branch switched from the ISC DHCP client v3.x to the
OpenBSD DHCP client which was based on ISC DHCP v2.x). The biggest problem was
to figure how to set it up in order to be able to update its DNS records
obtained from the DHCP server. The solution is very simple: don't let the
client do this setting (as in RELENG_5 with ISC DHCP) but do it on the server
side level. It has the other advantage not to care how to do this on multiple
heterogeneous clients (UNIX, Unix-like, Windows, etc.).
On the other side, there is one problem though. Because
this release needs testing, the default kernel comes with debugging options
enable (INVARIANTS and WITNESS(4) in particular) which have the side effect of
slowing down the machine, really. These options help debugging and lightning some problems that may
appeared in the development process. One of this is called a LOR and i encountered two of them. They are already
known to the developers, but we don't know yet the real impact of
these: harmless or not. Here is the thread about this on current@.
Go testing. I will try to reproduce the panic i encountered before to know
the code path where this happens.
