"I don't know, in the 4.x days I worked for a company that built and deployed very stable commercial grade products on the 4.x release."

It is very appropriate that you remember the 4.x days like that since that is the last time there was a long term, stable target for FreeBSD development (and investment). Remember, the 4 branch went to 4.11.

It is 4.x that I identified in my original mailing list post (2012) as the time, after which, I thought FreeBSD began having problems with focus and longevity.

Funnily enough, 4.x is when jkh went to Apple.

I've never had a single kernel panic on FreeBSD and I'm using it since the 4.0 release.

I can't remember if I've ever had a FreeBSD release panic on a server, but I've seen plenty over the years on laptops. The largest source of panics is drivers, and there's far more diversity (and less testing) in the mobile space than in the server space.

Consider yourself lucky you don't have to deal with radeon drivers! This week alone, I had two different kernel panics, one on my notebook and another on my desktop, both of which use radeon (different gpu models), and in both cases radeon was the culprit.

For the record, I think we all agree that this kind of panic is not FreeBSD's fault. Linux support for this kind of driver is more stable and advanced, but, even though I use FreeBSD both for production and personal use, its "expected" case is production server.

Have you tried drm-next? https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics

It's an update of the graphics stack to match modern Linux. Apparently amdgpu leaks memory, but radeonkms might work fine.

AMD/ATI graphics drivers have always been terrible. Never seen a problem with NVidia or Intel.

Isn't the radeon driver proprietary?

I have kernel panics on 10.3 on a regular basis, varying from several times per day to a couple of times per week according to workload.

There's something inside wait6 and kevent that causes a thread to sleep whilst holding a non-sleepable lock. I hit it more than most I suspect because on my systems a lot of processes are blocked in kqread, whereas with the stock toolset one sees few processes using kevent.

I brought the subject up last year on freebsd-hackers, but nothing came of it.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13622945

had a kernel panic once, i think it was some 9.x, when unplugging a mounted usb stick (oops)

Maybe 7.x? Until 7.2-RELEASE removal of active disk devices was a very reliable panic.