svn commit: r45781 - head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status
Warren Block <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.os.freebsd.devel.cvs.doc |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Author: wblock
Date: Fri Oct 10 23:45:01 2014
New Revision: 45781
URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/doc/45781
Log:
Add Debian GNU/kFreeBSD report.
Modified:
head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-07-2014-09.xml
Modified: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-07-2014-09.xml
==============================================================================
--- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-07-2014-09.xml Fri Oct 10 23:16:33 2014 (r45780)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2014-07-2014-09.xml Fri Oct 10 23:45:01 2014 (r45781)
@@ -1858,4 +1858,126 @@
</task>
</help>
</project>
+
+ <project cat='proj'>
+ <title>Debian GNU/kFreeBSD</title>
+
+ <contact>
+ <person>
+ <name>Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Maintainers</name>
+ <email>[email protected]</email>
+ </person>
+ </contact>
+
+ <links>
+ <url href="https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD">Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on the Debian Wiki</url>
+ <url href="https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/" />
+ </links>
+
+ <body>
+ <p>Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a software distribution produced by
+ Debian, based on the kernel of &os; (instead of Linux) and GNU
+ libc. Around 90% of Debian's software archive has now been
+ ported to it, for amd64 and i386 architectures. It was first
+ released with Debian "squeeze" as a development preview in
+ 2011, featured again in the "wheezy" release, and hopes to be
+ part of the official Debian "jessie" release early 2015.</p>
+
+ <p>In 2003 there were several attempts to bootstrap a minimal
+ Debian system upon &os; or NetBSD kernels, some also trying to
+ use the native BSD libc. The most successful and
+ longest-lived of these was a "GNU/FreeBSD" chroot bootstrapped
+ by Robert Millan with the GNU libc that most of Debian's core
+ packages were designed to work with. The "k" was later added
+ to the name to reflect that it takes just the kernel from
+ &os;, with most everything else from the Debian archive. We
+ do also package some FreeBSD utilities as needed to boot it
+ and take advantage of certain features.</p>
+
+ <p>&os; support within GNU libc is now mostly maintained by Petr
+ Salinger, who recently converted it from an older threading
+ implementation based on LinuxThreads to NPTL which is much
+ more compatible with the software we run. We have the GNU
+ compiler toolchain as well as Clang 3.4; Perl, Python and
+ Ruby; and OpenJDK 7, based the on work done in &os;'s own
+ ports collection. We use linprocfs for <tt>/proc</tt> because
+ much of Debian GNU software expects this. The Linuxulator
+ is not needed at all, but could make for interesting future
+ uses. Porting work mostly focuses now on individual packages'
+ build systems, on preprocessor #ifdefs that do not clearly
+ distinguish between kernel and libc, or fixing testsuites'
+ presumptions of Linux-specific behaviour. In the course of
+ this, we even found the odd &os; kernel bug, including
+ EN-14:06 / CVE-2014-3880.</p>
+
+ <p>GNU/kFreeBSD has already seen production use, mostly on
+ webservers, email servers and file servers; one such machine
+ has 475 days' uptime receiving around 10,000 emails per day.
+ It has become increasingly practical for desktop/laptop uses
+ thanks largely to new features coming in from &os; 10.1.</p>
+
+ <p>KMS graphics mean that 3D gaming and high-definition video
+ playback perform brilliantly. We have great support for Intel
+ graphics chipsets, but only an older nvidia Xorg driver. For
+ radeonkms, Robert Millan was able to add firmware-loading
+ support so that non-free binary blobs can be packaged
+ separately, outside of Debian's main archive. Proprietary
+ drivers are not useful to us as they would need to be rebuilt
+ from source to port them.</p>
+
+ <p><tt>vt(4)</tt> was necessary for KMS to not break VT
+ switching. But it has also improved the console's handling of
+ non-ASCII character sets and we do look forward to having
+ console fonts for non-Latin script.</p>
+
+ <p>We have supported ZFS for some time, even as a root/boot
+ filesystem (using GRUB 2; Robert Millan added the ZFS support
+ which now &os; itself is able to benefit from). Enhancements
+ coming from OpenZFS, especially LZ4 compression, in
+ combination with better memory management and GEOM
+ improvements, mean that "jessie" should see a noticeable
+ performance boost.</p>
+
+ <p>debian-installer already allows for pre-seeded, unattended
+ installs and there are PXE-bootable install images
+ available.</p>
+
+ <p>virtio drivers are new to the "jessie" release, enabling
+ support for some public clouds. We are now compiling Xen domU
+ and PVHVM support into our standard kernel builds.</p>
+
+ <p>We already have userland tools to configure the PF firewall.
+ As an experimenting, we are compiling in IPSEC support by
+ default for the upcoming release, and would like to see it put
+ to good use against present-day privacy and security
+ threats.</p>
+
+ <p>We try to support uses of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD inside a jail
+ on a &os; host system, and hopefully vice-versa. Some of the
+ jail utilities are not yet packaged, but we have documentation
+ on the Debian Wiki on how to set up jails on "wheezy", which
+ are fully functional.</p>
+
+ <p>The init system we currently use is a parallel System V-style
+ init, although Debian GNU/Linux will be switching away from
+ that to systemd. For the next release we may switch to
+ OpenRC, which is mostly ported already.</p>
+
+ <p>Not having systemd or udev, means that we will be unable to
+ support GNOME 3.14 in the upcoming release. We have very good
+ support for XFCE, also have KDE, LXDE and the
+ recently-packaged MATE desktop environment. The Debian
+ software archive provides many alternative window managers for
+ Xorg such as IceWM, dozens of terminal emulators, and so
+ on.</p>
+
+ <p>As we approach the freeze of the Debian "jessie" release,
+ we would love for anyone to test GNU/kFreeBSD, try to use it
+ for whatever would be useful to you, and let us know what
+ issues you run into. Ask for help on our project mailing list
+ or IRC channel, and let us know of any bugs you find. We
+ still have time to fix problems before release, and we would
+ be happy to improve our documentation any time.</p>
+ </body>
+ </project>
</report>
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