Re: Release advice.

> Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 09:21:04 +0000 (GMT)
> From: Andrew Back <[email protected]>
> Sender: [email protected]
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Some time ago I tried getting a PCMCIA WLAN card working via a PCI ->
> PCMCIA bridge under FreeBSD4.5-RELEASE. Despite numerous attempts to get
> it working, various patches and assistance from people on this list, all
> my attempts failed.
> 
> I'm about to try and get the same hardware configuration working again,
> and wondered whether it would be best to do that under 4.7-RELEASE, or
> wait for 5.0-RELEASE.

It will probably work for either 4.7 or 5.0. The support for PCI
->PCMCIA bridges was heavily re-worked between 4.4 and 4.7 and is
pretty solid.

The entire CardBus support software was re-done for 5.0 with
NEWCARD. If ACPI works, the card should be fine. If not, it probably
will still work. And OLDCARD is still available in V5 for system that
lack CardBus hardware (mostly very old laptops).

The down-side to V5 is that it has a LOT of new stuff in it and it's
clearly not as clean as everyone would wish. The changes are HUGE in
many, many critical sub-systems. Things like the new SMP code, ACPI
support, and GEOM impact the most basic parts of the kernel.

I have been running 5.0 release candidates for some time and they are
running pretty well, but they are not close to the robustness of
4.7. Maybe by 5.1 they will be.

R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: [email protected]			Phone: +1 510 486-8634

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