To the opening post, although we're now a version higher:
How do you test 13.0-CURRENT?
As my
primary system, for the past few years. TrueOS (based on FreeBSD -CURRENT), 12.0-CURRENT, 13.0-CURRENT and now 14.0-CURRENT.
Everyday use, on hardware (not virtualised).
Use of Windows in VirtualBox is secondary. VirtualBox to test other systems (including FreeBSD, and some based on FreeBSD) is tertiary.
… I'm sure one can do that in a VM …
True, but see below.
but CURRENT can be unstable without notice.
Whilst it's explicitly
bleeding edge, I never felt bloodied.
Quoting a manager at Netflix: "… Although it might seem scary to run "development" code in production, we find that it works very well in practice. The FreeBSD development branch is usually quite stable. …".
Is that a problem? I wouldn't think so …
You think correctly. If you choose ZFS you have:
… the security/convenience of boot environments …
– and much more.
… ZFS on my laptop that only has a single disk …
The same here.
I run CURRENT on my desktop and laptop. From time to time it breaks, but then I am forced to fix it. …
Maybe once a year I find a need to boot a previous boot environment.
latest for packages might be perceptibly more of a problem than -
CURRENT base but still, I can't describe any of this as so bloody or unstable that it can't be good for everyday use with boot from ZFS. YMMV, depending on use case.
When you have a virtual machine FreeBSD guest@ZFS on a host@UFS, you will very likely benefit from inserting the
gsched(8) I/O scheduler (on the host). This will keep the host system responsive during heavy concurrent disk I/O, …
File systems aside: also/alternatively, VirtualBox allows execution to be capped, on the fly (whilst the guest runs) for the same purpose, to keep the host responsive.
I guess most of them pick one of the ISO …
Maybe.
I learnt the hard way that it can be
much more pleasant to begin with ZFS (e.g. install from an ISO file), than with UFS on FreeBSD-provided disk images.
… I use the official memstick installer image …
I go for
⋯disc1.iso
I might have tried the memstick alternative on a handful of occasions. (Most recently, with computers on which FreeBSD can not be installed; the memstick also failed.)
… But I don't know where they install it. Probably VM. …
FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT aside: with
emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions, to have no risk of kernel panic (in the guest) whilst
rc(8) runs scripts at startup time, it may be advisable to:
- limit the guest to a single CPU.
I have not found time to investigate why some FreeBSD guests (with two or more CPUs) are more prone to this bug than others.