When should the cautious users upgrade from 11.1 to 11.2?

[Mark Adkins]

After looking at the forum for a few days and seeing a post or two on losing data and other posts on UI issues, I thought I'd post this and see if I can get an official response.

For 11.1, the updates slowed down after U4 at the end of March about 3 to 4 months after release. 11.2 being a much more major update, wondering if it would be prudent to skip 11.2 and wait for 11.3 for the more conservative user?

 

[Chris Moore]

The thing to understand is that the -RELEASE and -U1 are big indicators of revisions also. There are bound to be issues with 11.2 in general because of the number of changes especially around the UI between 11.1 and 11.2, but (historically) they usually have a stable platform by the -U3 or -U4 revision. There are other significant changes scheduled for the next point release at 11.3-RELEASE; so that might be just as likely to cause issue as 11.2-RELEASE. If you want to be 'safe' just hold off three or four months, maybe six, to give them time to find and fix this batch of quirks. Every release has quirks, not even Microsoft gets every thing perfect.

 

[seanm]

You also have to balance it against the fact that 11.2 includes security fixes that are not fixed in older versions. May not matter at home behind a firewall, but may be important in a corporate environment or if connected the public internet.

 

[Apollo]

One of the bigger challenge and reliability concern I have seen so far with Freenas 11.2 is the increase panic attacks associated with LSI based controllers (myslef as well as the ones reported on this forum by other members).
I have switched to a AMD system a few month ago while on the Beta of 11.2 and have seen some issues related to LSI, but as a new system to FreeBSD I wasn't too concerned at the time and thought things would be ironed out, which they have.
However, the same LSI controller did report some panic on an Intel system and it seems this issue is in IMHO specific to FreeBSD 11.2.

To me, it seems LSI may not be the most reliable solution anymore.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I'm pretty caution usually. Was on 9.10 for a long long time but 11.2 is probably the most stable release since 9.10 i have seen. It has lots of security fixes, freebsd updates and zfs updates. Overall I think it's a worth release to upgrade to.

I'm not sure what @Apollo is referring to about the lsi controller issues. Mine seems to be doing just fine.

 

[adrianwi]

I would agree with this.

I stayed on 9.3.1 until FreeBSD 9.3 became EOL and did pretty much the same with 9.10.1-U4 hanging on to VirtualBox for dear life. I eventually weaned myself off VirtualBox for iohyve/bhyve and then upgraded to 11.1. This gave me chance to rebuild all of my jails using iocage, so the upgrade to 11.2 was pretty painless.

So in the last 4 years, I've probably only upgraded 4 times, which I think would put me in the somewhat cautious camp, but I don't think it's too much of a gamble to upgrade from 11.1 to 11.2 right now.

 

[DrKK]

My main box is still 9.10.

I do run 11.2 latest on my backup.