I'm upgrading several systems these days to the 8.1 (pre-release) and have hit the following troubles... I could file a formal PR for each, I suppose, but, maybe, this way will get the right people's attention sooner.

In no particular order:

  1.
     A picture, that one of the systems was displaying at boot (and
     then used as a screen-saver),  stopped showing properly. The
     colors are right, but the picture is distorted beyond recognition.
     The relevant part of loader.conf is:

         splash_pcx_load="YES"
         vesa_load="YES"
         bitmap_load="YES"
         bitmap_name="/boot/187426-9-quokka-dreaming.pcx"

     the picture file is identified as:

         PCX 772x551 772x551+0+0 8-bit PseudoClass 256c 454KB 0.039u
         0:00.093

  2.
     FREEBSD_COMPAT7 kernel option is, apparently, a requirement (and
     thus not an "option") -- the kernel-config files, that worked with
     7.x, break without this option in them (in addition to all the
     nuisance, that's documented in UPDATING -- which, somehow, makes
     the breakage acceptable). config(8) would not warn about this, but
     kernel build fails.
  3.
     Likewise, having "device ugen" breaks config(8) -- another
     undocumented incompatibility.
  4.
     The sio(4) is described in UPDATING as "removed", but rouses no
     complaint from config(8) either. It just breaks the kernel
     build... It should be an alias for uart, IMHO -- all I want is for
     my serial ports to be usable, whether their driver is called
     "Serial Input/Output" or "Universal Asynchronous Receiver and
     Transmitter".
     (BTW, about the /dev-entries -- do we /really/ have to change the
     names of the serial port-devices every couple of years? It is
     rather painful to reconfigure the fax- and ppp-software, etc.) How
     does the Microsoft world manage to stay with the COM1, COM2 for
     decades?)
  5.
     One of the upgraded systems would repeatedly hang at boot, until I
     disabled the on-board firewire-device through the BIOS... It was
     not a problem under 7.x, although I don't know, whether the device
     actually worked.
  6.
     Despite the reported improvements in the USB area, my USB keyboard
     /still/ does not work during boot. It during POST and then after
     the booting is complete. But in single-user mode -- no... Had to
     fish-out the PS2 keyboard...
  7.
     All my "dangerously dedicated" disks lost the "s1" in the
     subdevice-names after the upgrade: /dev/da1s1d became /dev/da1d,
     etc. I like the shorter names (and there are, indeed, no "slices"
     there), but having to fix them manually upon reboot was unpleasant
     and uncalled for. As with uart/sio, backward-compatibility aliases
     are a fine idea and really improves user's experience...
  8.
     I tried to do an install on one of the systems via netbooting
     (pxeload) the disk1-image. It booted, but the sysinstall had to be
     started manually and, once started, did not act the same as when
     booted off of CD-ROM. Seems like a simple bit to correct so that
     setting "init" to /usr/sbin/sysinstall/manually on every boot/ is
     not necessary...
  9.
     The k8temp utility (installed by sysutils/k8temp
     <http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/k8temp>), which worked fine on
     both of my AMD-machines, no longer works on the Athlon one (still
     works on the Opteron-based server). I reinstalled the port, but
     that did not help -- the utility runs, but does not say anything.
     Requeting debug-info is of little help:

         *ro...@quokka:~ (101) k8temp
         *ro...@quokka:~ (102) k8temp -d
         CPUID: Vendor: AuthenticAMD, 0x6a0: Model=0a Family=6+0 Stepping=0
         Advanced Power Management=0x1
             Temperature sensor: Yes
           Frequency ID control: No
             Voltage ID control: No
              THERMTRIP support: No
             HW Thermal control: No
             SW Thermal control: No
             100MHz multipliers: No
             HW P-State control: No
                  TSC Invariant: No

If any of the above can be corrected or, at least, documented, before release, we stand a little bit better chance of getting the praise otherwise well-deserved by FreeBSD... Thanks. Yours,

   -mi

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