Experiences Upgrading to FreeBSD 5.X

I've been using FreeBSD 4.8 for several months now on my daily use computer and have been thinking about updating to 5.1 (or whatever is latest when I do it). I've read through the release notes and other associated documentation and the recommended installation method is a fresh installation.

I would like to know others' experiences with 5.X, particularly any problems you may have had and whether there are any outstanding advantages over 4.8 that are of note.

I am only playing with 5.1R for some weeks now.
Advantages so far:
- DevFS support - no need to create devices. But was it such a big task anyway?

Disadvantages:
- DevFS forgets changed permissions on reboot. Still need to find a way to solve this so I (as user) can eg. mount the CD-Rom.
- Nearly no binary packages available, I had to compile most myself. On the other hand if you compile anyway...

And disadvantage for both of them: The handbook contains now mixed info for 4/5, some is not yet up to date

So far I have to say that I could just as well have stayed with my 4.8. (4.9 should be released these days).

...M

Reposting my experiences from the other thread (http://forums.devshed.com/t88025/s.html)

My first try (about 2 months ago) wasn't very pleasant. Basically, I had a box which had FreeBSD 4.8 running perfectly on it and I decided to blow the contents away and install 5.x. Trouble was that the CD panicked at the second stage of booting and simply refused to boot. I googled and found quite a few posts reporting the same error message. It seems that the boot loader has changed between 4.x and 5.x and the new boot loader didn't work for my computer.

My next machine went much better -- this was a rackmount that my co-worker brought into the office, because it kept dying at the co-lo for no reason and he suspected some faulty hardware. While he was waiting for the new hardware to come over, I decided to give 5.1 a try on it -- Install went smoothly with no hitches at all. Since this was a production machine, I didn't install X on it, so I don't really know how the config for X has changed from 4.x (i.e. the mouse and video card stuff that kfickert mentioned above). The first problem I hit was when I tried to build a custom kernel --- we have a lot of similar computers and so, over time, we had developed a couple of config files that we use to build custom kernels for all the computers. Trouble was that the file that had worked unchanged for all versions of 4.x (all the way from 4.2!) didn't work with 5.1 -- the make depend part failed. So, I took a look at 5.1's GENERIC and noticed a few differences from the 4.x series, that made our custom file fail. So, I copied the 5.x GENERIC file and pruned it to make it similar to the custom file and the kernel build went fine. FWIW, I ran that computer for a couple of days until the new hardware came over. The kernel panicked twice on my custom kernel, and later googling showed that this may be a known bug when you have SMP enabled (with some specific options). The default GENERIC kernel ran great though for 2 days .

The big question -- would I switch to it. For my home play box -- sure, if I could only get the boot loader to work right. For production -- I would play around with it some more, before I jump into it. Right now, we're running just fine with 4.x kernels, so there's no overwhelming need for us to switch right away. Your needs may be different from ours, so don't take my comments as good advice. Just my 2 cents .

I've been using 5.x on a couple web servers for some months now.

Some problems include certain PHP functions not working:
- ftp_nlist and ftp_rawlist work via CLI, but not in the Apache module;
- exec() works with FreeBSD 5.0, but not 5.1);

...just minor annoyances that should be fixed when it goes stable.

Well that kind of worries me. I don't use those functions but I wonder what functions I do use that don't work.

Yeah - it was driving me crazy at first... we weren't getting 'Call to Undefined Function' errors...just no result.

After searching through bugs.php.net and someother message boards there seem to be some issues with PHP and FBSD 5.x - but only with functions that use OS resources (exec, system, some (but not all) ftp functions, etc...)