using FreeBSD 8.2 for a production system

vecihi

vecihi

hello,

I'm using FreeBSD 8.2 release for a production system with ZFS drivers...

I didn't upgrade it to FreeBSD9 because of device driver compatibility reasons... Our device vendor has drivers only for "FreeBSD 8.2".

For a developer view: what are the disadvantages of using 8.2 related to "security / kernel / ZFS" performance?

Or how can I track weakness/disadvantages of using FreeBSD 8.2 release?

I/O performance is very important for me. Should I review FreeBSD 8.2 choice?

Best regards.
 
vecihi said:
For a developer view: what are the disadvantages of using 8.2 related to "security / kernel / ZFS" performance?

Or how can I track weakness/disadvantages of using FreeBSD 8.2 release?

I/O performance is very important for me. Should I review FreeBSD 8.2 choice?
Click to expand...

FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE reached End Of Life on July 31, 2012 and is no longer supported. You probably want to upgrade to FreeBSD 8.3.
 
throAU said:
As above, 8.2 has holes in it, you really want to be running 8.3. 8.3 should be driver compatible with 8.2.
Click to expand...

There is no such guarantee unfortunately. The kernel programming API may change between minor releases in a incompatible way. The ABI stability covers only userland programs.
 
The first to check is if the FreeBSD supports the drives with other kind of drivers. I mean, your vendor provides drivers, but the community could have developed other drivers to overtake the compatibility problem you describe, so check out if the hardware is compatible with later versions of FreeBSD and to which extent.

Having said that, it is quite clear that using an old version, and in particular a no more supported one, is a problem from the point of view of development because you risk to develop something that will not run in the future releases.

The only suggestion could be to check, if possible, a later release on the same (or similar) hardware. This of course is not always possible.
 
vecihi said:
hello,

I'm using FreeBSD 8.2 release for a production system with ZFS drivers...
Click to expand...

There is no such thing as ZFS drivers.

vecihi said:
I didn't upgrade it to FreeBSD9 because of device driver compatibility reasons... Our device vendor has drivers only for "FreeBSD 8.2".
Click to expand...

Please share some more information about the device in question.

vecihi said:
For a developer view: what are the disadvantages of using 8.2 related to "security / kernel / ZFS" performance?

Or how can I track weakness/disadvantages of using FreeBSD 8.2 release?

I/O performance is very important for me. Should I review FreeBSD 8.2 choice?

Best regards.
Click to expand...

FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE is EOL as others have mentioned before.

Aside for that, FreeBSD 8.2 + ZFS is a bad combination. Most of my servers at that time had been moved to 8.2-STABLE because of ZFS issues.
 
Additionally, you could ask your vendor to try to build the driver on a more recent version of FreeBSD. I suppose that there is a high chance that it'll compile on a 8.x system and maybe it'll compile on a 9.x system as well.
 
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