Debian Gets FreeBSD Kernel Support

mu22le writes "Today Debian gets one step closer to really becoming 'the universal operating system' by adding two architectures based on the FreeBSD kernel to the unstable archive. This does not mean that the Debian project is ditching the Linux kernel; Debian users will be able to choose which kernel they want to install (at least on on the i386 and amd64 architectures) and get more or less the same Debian operating system they are used to. This makes Debian the first distribution, and probably the first large OS, to support two completely different kernels at the same time."

Comments

Re:ZFS support

[flnca]

GCC and the whole configure/automake crap are a nightmare to deal with (not to mention that there still is no decent documentation for the whole configure/automake process). A replacement for GCC would be a good start. BTW, for portability efforts, one should take a look at the work of Dr. Martin Richards from the university of Cambridge UK. He invented BCPL, the - more or less - direct ancestor of C, and had a system for portability called INTCODE already in 1967, that - if used in this or similar form nowadays - would be a millionfold more simple and effective than the current GNU build mechanism. Sun reinvented the wheel and called it "JVM" ... INTCODE was grand. I once had a runtime system built on it that I moved from Amiga to Windows to OS/2 within minutes ... the INTCODE interpreter being just a small ANSI C program ... the runtime system being modules based on INTCODE that just had to be COPIED. Man, just thinking about it is sort of comical ...

Re:ZFS support

[smash]

My experience with ports/packages vs apt-get (about 10 years worth as a real world admin) is that the theoretical advantages of apt-get are no big deal.

However, having the ability to *easily* do
# cd /usr/ports/foobar && make config && make package

...is beneficial.

I'm not saying that pkg_add or ports are perfect. But that for all the theoretical benefits, I don't see the big win from apt-get. I'm not deinstalling a heap of packages at a time on my boxes (servers) - they are built for a particular purpose. Sure, for a desktop apt-get is a win, but in the server room, you don't fuck with shit that often. If you do, its generally a new box via hardware replacement....