Question about naming of stable branch

Hi there, I'm quite new to FreeBSD. I started with the 15.0-RELEASE and went to STABLE as 15.1 was released. So my 'uname -or' says: "FreeBSD 15.1 STABLE".
Am I right, that when the 15.2 RELEASE will be released, my 'uname -or' will still tell me the same, although I'm up to date? Or will it switch magically to "FreeBSD 15.2 STABLE"?

Or in short: what about minor release numbers of the STABLE branch? The naming is just telling from where I started, right?

sry for my bad english & thanks for reading, cheers!
 
Release branches are created from the stable branches. In a way the stable branches are an alpha release of the next minor release from that major branch.


Am I right, that when the 15.2 RELEASE will be released, my 'uname -or' will still tell me the same, although I'm up to date?
No, -STABLE is more like a rolling release, stable/15 is now 15.1-STABLE, at some point[*] this changes to 15.2-PRERELEASE and some final preparations are done. Then releng/15.2 is branched off and stable/15 will become 15.2-STABLE, the releng/15.2 branch will be 15.2-RELEASE.

[*] Around 23 October: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.2R/schedule/
 
Thanks for the quick response! And if I may ask you another question:
Would you recommend to a noob like me, who just uses the xterm for everything exept watching streams and therefore firefox [on xorg, maybe xlibre soon] to switch to CURRENT?
Because I was switching to FreeBSD from Debian testing and loved to be fully rolling. Or is it really that unstable as noted in the handbook?
 
Why wouldn't you use RELEASE? From the handbook "Welcome to FreeBSD! This handbook covers the installation and day to day use of FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE, FreeBSD 14.4-RELEASE and 13.5-RELEASE. "

/grandpa
 
Would you recommend to a noob like me, who just uses the xterm for everything execpt watching streams and therefore firefox [on xorg, maybe xlibre soon] to switch to CURRENT?
Stick to a -RELEASE version.

Because I was switching to FreeBSD from Debian testing and loved to be fully rolling.
If you're more adventurous switch to -STABLE. Which is a supported development release.


Or is it really that unstable as noted in the handbook?
It's generally speaking quite stable, but it's the developer's playground, anything can happen, it could destroy your files, it could run perfectly fine. And any state in between.

 
grandpa because I installed 15-RELEASE with pkgbase, which I like, but the upgrade to 15.1-RELEASE was such a mess, that I decided to go STABLE to have it more rolling.
And it's nice, absolutely no problems to maintain it. And It's just my private notebook / daily driver.
So I'm thinking about to switch to current. SirDice I'm just a noob to FreeBSD, got 20 years of debian testing on my back and missing the rolling release...
Maybe after my switch from xorg to xlibre I will upgrade my sandbox to CURRENT and see how it's working for me.

cheers_
 
grandpa because I installed 15-RELEASE with pkgbase, which I like, but the upgrade to 15.1-RELEASE was such a mess, that I decided to go STABLE to have it more rolling.
And it's nice, absolutely no problems to maintain it. And It's just my private notebook / daily driver.
So I'm thinking about to switch to current. SirDice I'm just a noob to FreeBSD, got 20 years of debian testing on my back and missing the rolling release...
Maybe after my switch from xorg to xlibre I will upgrade my sandbox to CURRENT and see how it's working for me.

cheers_

Hi there, I'm quite new to FreeBSD. I started with the 15.0-RELEASE and went to STABLE as 15.1 ...

Sorry I misunderstood, I thought you went from RELEASE to STABLE.

Good luck with CURRENT!

/grandpa
 
but the upgrade to 15.1-RELEASE was such a mess, that I decided to go STABLE to have it more rolling.
Often, more rolling = more mess. You should have a look at my tool:

One thing you have to know is, that in CURRENT all the debug capabilities are on, so the OS should be slower than any other branch. It may be unnoticeable, depending what you do.

And, as SirDice wrote, don't expect (too much) help for CURRENT version on this forum.
 
One thing you have to know is, that in CURRENT all the debug capabilities are on, so the OS should be slower than any other branch. It may be unnoticeable, depending what you do.
I saw a comment or blog about that somewhere, and they had a couple options for malloc.conf to turn off debug things on CURRENT + there's a nodebug kernel

I found some more stuff for malloc.conf and use this (forget what most of it means but I like performance :cool:):

Code:
echo 'abort:false,confirm_conf:false,abort_conf:false,percpu_arena:phycpu,dirty_decay_ms:-1,muzzy_decay_ms:-1,stats_print:false,junk:false,zero:false,utrace:false,xmalloc:false,zero_realloc:free,trust_madvise:true,retain:true' | tee '/etc/malloc.conf' > '/dev/null'
 
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