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

I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[palegray.net]

But with FreeBSD doing Linux apps, and Debian able to run the FreeBSD kernel, things are getting kinda weird in UNIX-land.

I think I need to lie down now.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[edivad]

Not really. People mostly care of userspace apps they daily use, and as long as those are working fine, the kernel underneath is not really important. I'd still pick Linux over FreeBSD any day of the week, 365 days / year, but others might not care at all.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[MichaelSmith]

Not to mention Android using the linux kernel with a netbsd userland. I guess google don't want to mess with GPLv3.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[RiotingPacifist]

FreeBSD
*is more secure (apparently, i don't know enough to be sure but they're development model and security results do tend to suggest this)
*has zfs,
*etc

  while linux has other advantages,
*hardware support for many newer devices,
*faster boot (i think),
*lvm (imho when snapshot merging merges, i think it can compete with zfs)
*etc

So while I think the biggest difference though is the licensing, there are some pretty big differences that affect users.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[thedrx]

"This makes Debian the first distribution, and probably the first large OS, to support two completely different kernels at the same time."

Two kernels? At the same time? I'll be in my bunk.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[johnsonav]

You know what I'd do with a million bucks?

Two kernels at the same time.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[palegray.net]

That's just wrong. I swear, one of these days I'm going to start a site dedicated to the funniest damn comments on Slashdot.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you've Seen Seen On Slash On Slash.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[syousef]

You know what I'd do with a million bucks?

Two kernels at the same time.

Just 2??? For a million bucks? You're aiming to low. Imagine a beowulf cluster of them!

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Lobster Quadrille]

Wow. Meta-meta humor. My head is spinning.

On an unrelated note, Tonic water tastes funny without gin, but gin tastes fine without tonic.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[JustOK]

You should wait until someone makes one.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Nimey]

Hence why gin-and-tonic became popular amongst the British in tropical colonies. You need the tonic water for the quinine, but you also need the gin to make it palatable.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS is nice, but thus far FreeBSD's port isn't.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[gollito]

Ummmmm.... seenonslash?

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[metamechanical]

*faster boot (i think)

As an honest question (from someone who, not that it matters, runs both slackware at home and xp at work), what's with the obsession with boot time? Can anyone explain why the free software community is so obsessed with this metric? I understand that embedded devices are better when they boot immediately - nobody wants to have to wait to make toast - but to boot a computer? Don't most people just sleep or hibernate their computer these days anyway? I think that before yesterday, the last time I rebooted this machine was a couple months ago. I don't mean this as a slight - it's an honest question.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[concernedadmin]

FreeBSD
*is more secure (apparently, i don't know enough to be sure but they're development model and security results do tend to suggest this)

Citation needed. Also, their not they're.

*has zfs,

Btrfs, the response to ZFS, was merged into 2.6.29. If you really want ZFS, there is ZFS via FUSE, but since the start I've read of complaints regarding the slow performance.

*etc

If your other points aren't substantial, then you "etc" is meaningless.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Anthony_Cargile]

Not to mention Android using the linux kernel with a netbsd userland.

And the Debian/Ubuntu package repositories are full of openbsd-derived packages, many of which I run on servers due to my familiarity with them. Apple runs a modified FreeBSD kernel (XNU) with a mixed userland, and OpenSolaris has almost all pure SysV-derived apps just to add to add to all of the confusion.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[sortius_nod]

I'm confused by it myself. My machines don't even go to sleep or hibernate. Sure, we don't want stupidly long boot times when we do need to reboot, but that's what, once a month, once a year, once a decade if your server is in good health?

I'd say forget fast boot times unless it's a netbook or embedded device.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[mikesd81]

At the risk of burning some karma, I have to agree with you. Now, it's cool w/ the Linux BIOS that supports quite a bit of main boards, but really when I have to turn on my computer, after I restarted it or whatever, I use that time as I would a commercial on TV. Go take a leak, get a coffee, something like that. I can understand some times where a non-embedded system would want an instant-on type boot. Like a computer I want to install in my Jeep to run my mp3's and GPS. I don't want be driving and not have it booted until I get to my destination. Unless we're looking at the boot part wrong and people refer it to once the computer is started, and then all the programs that automagically start take a long time?

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Up until recently, I had so many problems with sleep/hibernate on every computer I put linux (whether it was fc, gentoo, debian, ubuntu, etc) that I never turned them on. I also didn't want to leave most of them running when I didn't need them so I turned them off to save power. I'm not sure about anybody else, but to me in the above scenario, boot time equated to whether or not I actually booted to linux, or just let it sleep/hibernate in windows.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Anthony_Cargile]

Two kernels? At the same time? I'll be in my bunk.

That's essentially what cooperative Linux does, runs a Linux kernel and the NT kernel at the same time, often with a special X emulator to get full-blown Linux apps running in Windows userspace with better support than with Cygwin. I still can't wrap my head around how the two kernels yield to each other in respect to the PC architecture, but it's an interesting project - guaranteed to keep you in your bunk for a while ;)

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[vadim_t]

It probably comes from the earlier days, where people were using things like Pentium 1 machines with 32MB RAM, and had badly tuned distributions that offered to install everything.

The user, not really knowing what they wanted went with that option, expecting something like a complete Windows install. The result would be a machine that took 5 minutes from the moment the kernel started loading, due to loading apache, portmap, bind, NIS, and a whole lot of other things most people had no clue what they were for.

These days it's not near so bad, but I guess the geeky interest in optimizing everything to the max remains. And if the computer can boot in one minute instead of two with no loss of functionality, why not?

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[kv9]

now all they (Debian) need to do is replace the userland with a BSD one (preferably Net) and we'll have a proper OS.

*zing*

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[TaoPhoenix]

George Orwell on Operating Systems!

"And there, Free BSD was doing Linux, and Debian Linux can run the BSD kernel, and lo, you could no longer tell them apart".

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[iris-n]

Energy saving.

I turn off my computer every night, when it isn't downloading something. It's about 6 hours of near-zero power consumption every day. If everyone did that it would make a difference in energy use. I could just suspend, but if it isn't going to do anything anyway, let's save a couple more joules, shall we?

And when I boot it in the morning, I don't want to have to wait two minutes just to see xkcd.

Especially since Arjan demonstrated it was so easy to optimise the process.

I think if the boot was quick to begin with, people wouldn't have got this bad habit of leaving the computer on 24/7. Just because Linux can run months straight doesn't mean that it should.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[itzdandy]

A couple reasons for quicker boot:

kernel or driver updates that cannot be dynamically unloaded and reloaded require a reboot. If you want to keep your system patched up to fix bugs and insecurities you will need to reboot at some point. Might sound like a trivial scenario but a long boot process can deter you from doing the necessary update.

Laptops and other mobile devices should boot quickly. Granted, suspend and hybernate are good options but these systems do need to be rebooted on occasion and nothing sucks more than a 5 minute reboot when your battery is low and you are on an airplane. believe it or not, sometimes X crashes and the system cant shake the leftovers because of an nvidia driver quirk.

virtual machine environments where bringing up more computing resources in a hurry is necessary and a fast booting VM image is necessary.

and lastly, the drive to make things work faster is what keeps the gears of progress spinning. If we get content to have slow bootup then we will always have slow bootup.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Ilgaz]

Apple's port too :) http://zfs.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/

  I mean they do a great work but it is basically not ready for prime time. For OS X, Prime Time means at least time machine support, data write/read (including all metadata, even Finder flags) support, Disk Utility GUI support and at last, boot support. Of course, don't forget no kernel crashes should happen and it should handle massive abuse, uptime and even sleep without any glitches. If a Mac doesn't sleep when no programs running, it is generally taken to service by end user.

Things go really complex when your potential ZFS loving users are professionals doing things with Resource (metadata) enabled files (e.g. Photoshop) and expect exact (not 99.9) feature compatibility with HFS+. If ZFS really rolled out in Leopard (10.5) release, there were even people asking for commercial, high end disk utility (like Disk Warrior) support.

What ZFS needs is a very practical use and the proof of how modern it is. Time Machine of OS X is the best thing to prove it to end users. Adding new disks easily when space runs out, snapshots etc. If there is one company which can make ordinary users say "Wow, I really need it" for such a high end filesystem, it is Apple.

I was actually expecting ZFS on XServe/RAID/OS X Server but I forgot the files stored on them are generally Apple Client files too.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[itzdandy]

I DVR my tv so what I do with the time wasted by commercials is skip it entirely.

I do agree that quicker boot isnt my highest priority for the future of linux but I certainly like my system to come up as fast as possible.

I do suspend my system and have it sitting on a very nice APC 1500VA UPS that lets me run for nearly an hour or will let me system sit in suspend for longer than I care to test.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[TJamieson]

I think to some extent this falls into the "why not?" category. The most common argument I've heard is with multi-GHz processors, why does there still seem to be a boot time floor, that no matter what you do, you cannot breach.

Personally, I think being able to start services in parallel on boot was one of the best things on the boot front re: linux. This goes something with a comment later in this thread -- back in the day, having a number of services starting during boot, with them being serially loaded, used to make linux look terrible to boot.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Xtravar]

Have you ever fucked up your system and had to reboot for hours of trial and error to fix it? Yeah, me neither... oh wait that was yesterday when I upgraded my kernel!

I guess if you have to pee every 5 minutes then it's okay, but a disk check is not necessarily what I want to sit through when I can't sleep until my system is fixed.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[RiotingPacifist]

i have an acer aspire5101, you insensitive clod!

Whenever i move the damn thing the HDD locks up and i have no choice but to reboot. (this is my second one of these it appears to be a systematic problem)

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Jurily]

As an honest question (from someone who, not that it matters, runs both slackware at home and xp at work), what's with the obsession with boot time? Can anyone explain why the free software community is so obsessed with this metric? I understand that embedded devices are better when they boot immediately - nobody wants to have to wait to make toast - but to boot a computer?

Boot time is the only time the computer is on when you can't switch to a browser while waiting for it to do something you want done, but aren't interested in the process. You can do that with copying, torrenting, uncompressing, compiling, encrypting, etc, but not boot.

Also, because you shouldn't have to wait.

Don't most people just sleep or hibernate their computer these days anyway?

I dual boot Gentoo and Vista. And ditching either one is not an option.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[keeboo]

Uh... So now it's GNU/FreeBSD?

(head explodes)

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[TwistedSymmetry]

The correct term is a Beowulf clusterfuck.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Deagol]

If you tune it correctly for i386, it's pretty damned stable. Without tuning on the amd64 arch, it's damned stable. After all, ZFS was developed for 64-bit Solaris, which, by all accounts, runs better than on 32-bit Solaris. And this is with the ZFS v6 available on 7.1 and the soon-to-be-released 7.2 -- v13 is slated for 8.0 (May or June of this year), and it's reported to be *much* better.

As someone who's run FreeBSD for their dedicated desktop for close to 5 years now, my only gripes are this:

1. Lack of more cutting edge virtualization software. At this point, Qemu is the only real option. Right now, you have to jump through hoops to get a FreeBSD *guest* under Zen, so being a Zen host is probably out of the question.
2. Lack of 3D acceleration, especially in the amd64 world. I had to scavenge a thrift-store "Radeon 7500 Series (RV200)" (as listed in pciconf) card to get any hardware acceleration, after years of using a newer Nvidia card. (nouveau isn't quite there). Granted, this can be more generally chalked up to a lack of open source drivers across the board (Hey, Nvidia! I'm buying ATI for my next card. You can stuff those binary blobs where the sun don't shine!)
3. Lack of native "shiny" proprietary software, such as Flash (and commercial games). In fact, I *just* finally gave in and installed the Linux emulation layer in order to install the flash9 plugin so I could check out all the "hey check this out..." links friends and family are always sending me.

I love FreeBSD, though. There have many times when I downloaded and and burned a new Linux distro CD with the intent of moving back to Linux (5 years prior to my jump to FreeBSD, I ran Redhat or Fedora on my desktop). However, when I tried the live CD, I just couldn't bring myself to go back, even with the few shortcomings I highlight above.

While the mating of Debian and FreeBSD is cool for its own sake, I really don't see how someone from either camp would be happy with the result. If you like the cutting edge hardware support, virtualization, filesystems, and software support of Linux, you'll miss them in FreeBSD. If you enjoy the Zen-like simplicity of the base FreeBSD OS (including its rock solid nature) and the "ports" system, you'll be left wanting with even the best Linux solution (which, in my opinion, would probably be Debian). I applaud the effort, but I doubt it will have much adoption in the long run.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Wonko]

There is for example an unresolved bug in ubuntu 8.10 which has bit me severly. It relates to total failure of sleep/hibernate and all that wonderful functionality on pci-e boxes.

Are you saying that all my laptops with pci-e video chipsets should be failing to suspend? Suspend and hibernate have worked fine on all my laptops for many years with Ubuntu, 8.10 or otherwise.

And no I won't provide the link to the bug, find it yourself on launchpad [launchpad.net] (I believe that is the correct access point)

It might be worth looking for the bug if you are more specific about the problem since there certainly isn't a suspend problem with every pci-e equipped machine.

And while uptimes are great, I often need to shut my box down so as to avoid cooking the occupants of my small apartment because it gets so bloody hot in here (26-27+`Celcius) in the middle of a Canadian winter with the heating set at 22.

The only thing that I dislike after resuming from a suspend is waiting for the damned wifi to connect. Resume takes 2-3 seconds or less. Reconnecting sometimes seems to take forever, especially in busy apartment complexes with 20+ aps in range.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[ChrisMP1]

Don't most people just sleep or hibernate their computer these days anyway?

Oh, I've heard that one so many times. Care to come over and see if you can get my Presario C751NR to sleep more than once without panicking? Trust me, if I could afford better hardware, I would.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[vadim_t]

Linux BIOS isn't for people who just think their box boots too slowly.

It's for people with large clusters, or important servers, where having an important server spend several minutes in the BIOS is a considerable annoyance. It also adds management facilities not present on many motherboards.

Picture having to go around with a keyboard and monitor, server by server, to change a BIOS setting on hundreds of servers.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Can't find it for the life of me, But I once saw a series of bench marks showing superior postgres performance on freebsd against linux for high concurrency with cpu cores > 8.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[phoenix_rizzen]

It all depends on what you do with it, and how much time you put into it. If you are willing to put in the effort up front, to plan out how the pool is created, to tune the OS and ZFS, and to test things ... then you can get a very performant, very stable system.

We have a pair of storage boxes running FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE with / and /usr on CompactFlash on one and USB sticks on the other (2x 2GB mirrored using geom_mirror), with /var, /tmp, /usr/local, /usr/src, /usr/obj, /usr/ports, /usr/ports/distfiles, and /storage/backup as ZFS filesystems. Some have compression enabled (gzip-9 or lzjb), some have atime enabled, some have snapshots created daily.

They're 5U rackmounts with 2x dual-core Opterons, 8 GB of ECC SDRAM, a 3Ware 9550SXU PCI-X RAID controller, a 3Ware 96650SE PCIe RAID controller, a 1350-watt 4-way redundant power supply, 4-port Intel gigabit NIC, as 24x 500 GB SATA harddrives.

The zpool is configured using 3x 8-drive raidz2 vdevs, giving a total usable space of just over 10 TB.

The primary server does an rsync-based backup of 90 FreeBSD and Linux servers every night. Takes just under 5 hours. According to MRTG, which polls the 32-bit storage counters every 60 seconds, it sustains 80 MBytes/sec for the bulk of the 5 hours. We can't get the 64-bit storage counters to work, so it's possible the counters are looping. We're also limited by the remote site bandwidth, as most sites are ADSL with ~768 Kbps uploads.

Other than some problems with the initial configuration of the server (don't use more than 9 drives in a raidz2 vdev), and with the initial "trial and error" for the kmem, ARC, and network tuning, it's been running very smoothly. We have daily backups going back four months, and only used 2 TB so far.

At this rate, we'll be able to keep a full year of daily backups without running out of space. And if we start to get low on space, we just swap out the drives in one of the raidz2 vdevs for larger ones, and continue one with the extra space.

We're really looking forward to the changes that FreeBSD 8.0 will bring, as it includes ZFS v13, removes the 2 GB kmem barrier, and a bunch of other unrelated performance enhancements.

Just because some people have run into some problems with ZFS, doesn't mean it's crap for everyone. You just need to run the 64-bit version, with lots of RAM, or be willing to test and tune to find the right settings for your 32-bit setup.

Once you've used a pooled storage system, or any filesystem with inline snapshots, you won't be able to use LVM anymore. LVM is okay, and has it's uses, but the snapshots system for LVM is crap, more crap, and worse crap.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[phoenix_rizzen]

1. Lack of more cutting edge virtualization software. At this point, Qemu is the only real option. Right now, you have to jump through hoops to get a FreeBSD *guest* under Zen, so being a Zen host is probably out of the question.

It's Xen, and you can run FreeBSD in an HVM just fine, no hoop-jumping required. Works for 32-bit and 64-bit guests, all the way back to 6.2 (earliest version I used in my testing).

It's true that PV support for FreeBSD guests is lacking, but that's not to say you can't run FreeBSD on Xen.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[tyrione]

Not LVM: Btrfs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Idiot with a gun]

If you read the top of that page, it noted that the majority of those listed problems were fixed for 8.x, but they weren't ready to be backported to 7.x

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[tyrione]

XNU isn't a modified FreeBSD Kernel. It's a modified Mach Kernel with FreeBSD/netBSD/OpenBSD additions hybrid kernel. It's mach messaging is intact, yet it's no longer a true micro-kernel.

Hell the Wiki entry is even off describing it as a modified Mach 2.5. It's a modified Mach 3.0+ derived hybrid kernel.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

I turn off my computer every night, when it isn't downloading something. It's about 6 hours of near-zero power consumption every day. If everyone did that it would make a difference in energy use. I could just suspend, but if it isn't going to do anything anyway, let's save a couple more joules, shall we?

The thing is, S3 suspend is damn near "soft-off" power usage anyway. On my Kill-A-Watt, both result in a power consumption of 3W. This is with an Antec EA-380 80+ PSU (Seasonic manufactured).

If you really want to save power, flip the switch and make your consumption zero. Better yet, kill your monitor, printer, speakers, and every other standby-consuming device at the same time by using the switch on your power supply.

The reality is, though, it's a bit stupid. If you really want to save power, use a notebook. My ThinkPad is around 26W at idle, compared with around 90W for my Core 2 Quad Q9300 / 8GB DDR2 / Radeon HD3850 desktop.

My power usage is around 220 kWh/mo. That's down from around 400kWh/mo (after I replaced a 1980s fridge with a new Energy Star fridge), but the refrigirator is still over a third of the total usage at 90kWh/mo. Add the electric dryer, electric range, and some lights, and you see that my power usage is dominated by heating, refrigeration, and lighting. Cutting the 20W or so of standby power usage that's around the house would only save 15kWh/mo, or less than 10%.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[RudeIota]

This isn't much of an argument for it, but aren't faster boot times better? Shouldn't we aim to improve things?

As far as why it is SO important, I can't say for sure. I think the desire for this is an extension of instant gratification. Why wait if you don't have to? That's really about the only argument I can think for it. Let us not forget enthusiast users as well, as a faster boot time is every bit as symbolic as faster HDD benchmarks, overclock CPUs, lower memory timings and +2FPS in a game. At the very least this appeals to the enthusiast -- simliar to squeezing every bit of horse power out of your car for a gear head.

As for other power states, standby is a waste of power and suspend-to-disk still takes a bit to load and to shutdown (about 10 seconds on my 4GB RAM laptop). As RAM capacities increase and the speeds of storage media do not (hopefully they will as SSD penetrates consumer markets), this is only going to take longer and longer. But yeah, I believe hibernate is a decent substitute. I can't recall seeing anyone use it though and as a computer technician, I get lots of questions about, "Should I hibernate my system???". Computer novices are scared of it. :-)

Also, granted, 10 or 20 seconds doesn't matter too much in a ~85,000 second day, but it would still be nice and I can think of a number of times it would have been helpful (like having to restart my businesses computer for a customer transaction after some funny behavior or restarting after some updates etc..).

Anyway, I can't really make a case for the importance of boot times for desktops, servers and such -- but I'm sure you'd agree with me that it's a positive thing and as such, perhaps you'd also agree that it is worthy of some consideration.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[FishWithAHammer]

IP KVM?

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[styrotech]

Hehe you were going for Funny but I reckon the Insightful mod wasn't far off.

I would love it if I could patch my OpenBSD machines (incl 3rd party apps) with the same ease I patch my Debian machines.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Em Adespoton]

In answer to your first question... no.
I've messed up my kernel/kernel config and had to boot as far as GRUB numerous times, but I've only had to boot through the entire daemon loading process twice in a row. After it gets that far, the kernel is generally stable and I just have to restart daemons to fix the rest.

Rebooting to fix userland issues should only be a Windows headache.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[ace123]

I believe nspluginwrapper is supposed to work on FreeBSD. If you haven't already it may be worth a try for getting Flash running as a different user-land process (it can't possibly depend on more than a few system .so's and you can probably extract those from the linux .deb packages)

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[jedwidz]

So you don't care about how fast trains are because it's faster to fly.

But wait, if trains suddenly became ten faster, you'd consider taking the train, right? So you do care.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[lukas84]

Well, if you talk about large servers..

First of all, the IBM x3650 and HP DL380 G5 spend a lot of time initializing their RAID controllers. This takes seemingly forever (the most recent ServeRAID 8k is the biggest offender, needing almost 2 minutes). LinuxBIOS wouldn't help much here.

Secondly, that's what you have managment tools for. IBM offers a tool called ASU to deploy new BIOS settings:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/toolsctr/v1r0/topic/sgtk_sa_win/pe_asu_config.html?resultof=%22asu%22%20

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[X0563511]

Nvidia doesn't have FreeBSD drivers for amd64. They want FreeBSD to make some changes, that they are apparently unwilling to make.

Throw another egg at Nvidia.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually NVIDIA has stated before that they wish to improve their FreeBSD support and would like it to achieve a feature parallel with Linux, as seen here.

They even did an interview with bsdtalk to try and drum up some support but it has yet to really materialize, here.

You can see current progress at the FreeBSD wiki.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[RiotingPacifist]

btfs is nice, but i like abstraction, lvm lets me run snapshots and re-sizable volumes over any filesytem format that linux supports (ntfs, reiserfs, ext4, etc). Unless btfs's snapshots offers major performance benefits over lvm's , ill always stick with the filesystem neutral solution.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[tyrione]

btfs is nice, but i like abstraction, lvm lets me run snapshots and re-sizable volumes over any filesytem format that linux supports (ntfs, reiserfs, ext4, etc). Unless btfs's snapshots offers major performance benefits over lvm's , ill always stick with the filesystem neutral solution.

Very reasonable, especially if you have to deal with a wide range of file systems in your network ecosystem.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[madsdyd]

There is really solid work for live patching a Linux kernel for security updates in http://www.ksplice.com/ - saw a demo of it last week at Eurosys, really impressive: http://www.ksplice.com/paper .

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Ksempac]

Although it doesnt seem to be the norm on /., some people (myself included), don't find necessary to have a computer running or even sleeping idle (and consuming electricity) for 10-15h/day when nobody is here to use it (during night and work hours).
It makes sense to keep a computer running 24/24 if it's a server, otherwise, it's useless. Moreover, if computer were fast to boot, hibernating would be almost useless.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Prof.Phreak]

Desktop, I agree with you. But laptop... well, I'm still "stuck" with XP on the laptop due to boot speed (using laptop on subway, you don't want it to take 60 seconds to come out of hibernate---or to do other stupid things when turning on).

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[AnibalOjeda]

You've got the point.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Haeleth]

Don't most people just sleep or hibernate their computer these days anyway?

No.

And it's not just the free software community that is obsessed with boot time. Microsoft is too; that's why Windows goes to a desktop as quickly as possible, before it's even finished loading everything. (Of course, they have even more reason to care, since you so often need to reboot Windows to install updates.)

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

nothing sucks more than a 5 minute reboot when your battery is low and you are on an airplane

Nothing sucks more than that, eh? You must have a tough life.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[x2A]

"I still can't wrap my head around how the two kernels yield to each other in respect to the PC architecture"

User Mode Linux manages it... imagine a UML running in kernel mode, loadable as a module... you lose the protection of running it in user mode, but you gain speed of running it within the kernel.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Tacvek]

Good point. That said, It would need to be a hardware IP KVM device, and not just a software version to support BIOS changes. It would still be easier to have a a way to broadcast updates out to many machines at once, which I presume is a capability of Linux BIOS. (I have never used it myself, so I have no idea if that is correct).

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Skater]

I have an older laptop that won't resume after suspend, either in Linux or FreeBSD. Works fine under Windows, so I assume it's a quirky BIOS problem. I'd love faster boot times for that computer.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[AvitarX]

I shut down my desktop because I use the Nvidia drivers, and they don't like to sleep/hibernate.

And I think my computer has an issue, because I have never gotten it to sleep properly (more accurately it never wakes up without rebooting, it does go to sleep).

Since I purchased a router with a USB port, I haven't been leaving my computer on at all.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Raenex]

Not to mention Android using the linux kernel with a netbsd userland. I guess google don't want to mess with GPLv3.

But by distributing the Linux kernel with the operating system, they are messing with GPLv2, so all that userland should be GPL to comply with the kernel license.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Deagol]

Indeed. However, I can watch Hulu shows now without resorting to Qemu (which is too slow anyway for the task) or the family XP machine (*shudder*).

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[halber_mensch]

Indeed. However, I can watch Hulu shows now without resorting to Qemu (which is too slow anyway for the task) or the family XP machine (*shudder*).

But now that everyone and their dog are producing flash content that refuses to operate if you don't have flash 10, and the linux flash 10 binary has declared ALSA as the One True Sound System, I no longer get sound in my nspluginwrapper'ed flash. I wonder if anyone out there was worked around this..

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[somenickname]

Have you ever fucked up your system and had to reboot for hours of trial and error to fix it? Yeah, me neither... oh wait that was yesterday when I upgraded my kernel!

Why didn't you just reboot and choose the old kernel?

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[chrysalis]

FreeBSD can run Linux apps, but this is only through system calls translations. And that system is far from being perfect. FreeBSD-specific bugs and specific behaviors will remain for emulated executables.

Want an example? The Neko VM ( http://www.nekovm.org/ ) is in the FreeBSD ports tree, but never worked. It crashes with a segfault on any MP system as soon as you create a thread. Why? Because FreeBSD threads have a different behavior than OSX/Linux/Windows/OpenBSD. Neko VM is extremely reliable on Linux. But if you run the Linux version on FreeBSD, it will crash the same way as the native version.

Running userland software with another kernel is fun, and sometimes it can be useful in order to run blobs (Flash, RAID tools, etc). But it can only be less reliable than what the tools were originally designed for. Plus it lacks testing, and you can't expect upstream developpers of software to test their software on hybrid systems like that.

Also, it all depends on your own definition of "distro", but PKGSRC supports a lot of operating systems for a long time, with a huge collection of software. But while it's technically polished for that task, software is actually used and tested only on NetBSD and DragonflyBSD. Other systems just receive minimal testing (basically "it compiles". And that testing is mainly automatic).

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[chrysalis]

"*is more secure"

FreeBSD is way behind every other modern operating system (yes, even Windows) when it comes to exploit mitigation techniques. It basically has nothing (at least in default configuration or in actual use).
It has become the main target to learn the basics of exploit coding. Seriously.
It doesn't mean that the FreeBSD team doesn't make a wonderful job at maintaining software up to date and at providing patches as soon as possible for vulnerabilities. Actually, they handle security reports in a very professionnal and effective way.
But that's reactive security. FreeBSD is really bad for proactive security. And it's way behind Linux, although some efforts have been made for FreeBSD 8 (like Propolice use).

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Lennie]

What they do is networkboot, with a really small fast booting BIOS, also because no1 wants to deal with a BIOS that says: Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Lennie]

The LinuxBIOS has the possibility to initialize several things at ones, which most other BIOS don't.

Like the large piece of memory or the large number of CPU's and very maybe that also means RAID-controller.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Lennie]

Why ?:

1. because things still need to be loaded from disk
2. because those fast machines still have a lot of hardware that needs to be initialized and a lot of those things have a certain timeout that needs to be waited for.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Deagol]

My apologies to Xen! I should have caught the misspelling.

You are correct. I forgot about the distinction, as I have an older Athlon 64, which doesn't have the hardware virtualization extension.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[BitZtream]

Just for reference:

According to MRTG, which polls the 32-bit storage counters every 60 seconds, it sustains 80 MBytes/sec for the bulk of the 5 hours. We can't get the 64-bit storage counters to work, so it's possible the counters are looping.

If you're polling every 60 seconds then than roll over wont' be a problem. MRTG will deal with the roll over fine on its own as long as it doesn't happen twice between polls. Since you're doing 80MB/s then you aren't going to move 4 gigs of data in 60 seconds anyway, so you don't really have to worry about counter wrap around.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Archwyrm]

If you are sitting through a disk check on every reboot, you might want to consider a journaling file system..

..Unless you are complaining about the time it takes to replay the journal, in which case you have bigger problems.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Chirs]

"Sure, we don't want stupidly long boot times when we do need to reboot, but that's what, once a month, once a year, once a decade if your server is in good health?"

I work for a company providing telecom equipment designed for 99.999% uptime.

The general recommendation is to have at least one backup machine, then once a week or so switch activity to the backup and reboot the formerly-active machine. This will uncover certain types of hardware glitches as well as ensuring that you can boot from disk in case of a power outage.

Anyone who hasn't rebooted for a year could be in for a surprise if they ever get a power outage.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[marcosdumay]

You mean weard like if all UNIXes were implementing the same standard, or something like that?

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Fweeky]

1. is no longer true since 7.1; the kernel address space is now big enough for tuning to typically be unnecessary (unless you're on i386, in which case you deserve your pain, even on Solaris).

Many of the remaining problems are gone in -CURRENT, but even with 7.0 my experience is that ZFS is stable enough for general use. Indeed, some people are running it successfully in production; FreeBSD package building, for instance.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[DaVince21]

(Hey, Nvidia! I'm buying ATI for my next card. You can stuff those binary blobs where the sun don't shine!)

But, you know, ATI is worse with video card support in Linux than nVidia...

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Fweeky]

We're really looking forward to the changes that FreeBSD 8.0 will bring, as it includes ZFS v13, removes the 2 GB kmem barrier

Already in 7.1.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Brandybuck]

Actually, they should have kept the FreeBSD userland. One of the major advantages of FreeBSD is that the base system is tightly integrated, with both the kernel and userland being developed in parallel by the same people.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Brandybuck]

I'm using the Open Source radeon driver under FreeBSD, and KDE desktop effects are snappy and smooth. BETTER than what I've seen with NVidia under Linux. No, it's not suitable for high end ubergeek gaming, but if that's what you are concerned with, FreeBSD is not for you...

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[DaVince21]

Well, at least they got somewhere then... I had to spend the longest time with my somewhat crappy x1100 hoping it got supported a bit better. (Haven't used a PC with an ATI card in over a year now, so I can't really say much about it anymore.)

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[RCL]

You can install wine and then use Windows-based Firefox + flash (I'm also a Freebsd desktop user). It's less convenient than Linux plugin (which can be used in native FreeBSD Firefox), but you get faster access to newer Flash versions.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[jefurii]

what's with the obsession with boot time? Can anyone explain why the free software community is so obsessed with this metric? ...Don't most people just sleep or hibernate their computer these days anyway?

You're right when it comes to servers or desktops, but for laptops it's a different story. Sleep or hibernate are often not supported by Linux on laptops, and given the increasing market share of laptops vs. desktop, boot time is something to pay attention to.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Deagol]

I use FreeBSD/amd64, and Wine will not work on that platform due to a missing kernel syscall. As I said in my first post, I installed the FreeBSD Linux emulation layer (aka "linuxulator") to use the Linux flash9 package as a plugin for the native Firefox 3 port, and that works well enough, even if it is a *huge* memory hog (but I have 4GB, so I don't care too much).

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[rbanffy]

But can Debian folks bundle ZFS according to Debian's own rules?

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[rbanffy]

Count that as three. Debian also runs on the Hurd microkernel.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[rbanffy]

BTW, What microkernel is running the latest version of HURD?

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Rysc]

Are you spreading misinformation deliberately or are you just tragically uninformed?

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[kv9]

I would love it if I could patch my OpenBSD machines (incl 3rd party apps) with the same ease I patch my Debian machines.

what, you can't use pkgsrc?

*zing #2*

thanks, I'll be here all week. try the index2.pl

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Raenex]

Neither. Which are you?

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[RiotingPacifist]

Its something like nvidia(p)>glgrx(p)>intel>radeon|usability|>nvidia. I quite like the radeon open driver, its a damn site more stable than the last nvidia one i used even if it is too slow for compositing and 3d games.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[LWATCDR]

For me it comes down to two reasons.
1.iTunes doesn't run under Linux.
2. FSX doesn't run under Linux.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[BlueYoshi]

Imagine what i could do with a cluster of million bucks!

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Errtu76]

virtual machine environments where bringing up more computing resources in a hurry is necessary and a fast booting VM image is necessary.

A good example is Novell Orchestrator which fires up VMs on demand (eg. when a high load triggers it). You don't want to wait minutes for it to load because by that time it might be too late (the customer will already notice a performance decrease).

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[ushdfgakj]

Amarok etc. runs like a charm, if you like shitty, bloated music software.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[LWATCDR]

Except I have an IPod Touch. Only ITunes will download apps. Still will not help with FSX.
Other than that I tend to use Linux. Oh and now I must add SolidWorks to the reasons why I must reboot.
Here is the problem. I like Flight Sims. Falcon, FSX, and IL2 only run on Windows. When I do my next build I will probably run Windows under Virutal Box for ITunes.
I sure don't use ITunes to play music. Just to sync my Ipod. I tend to use VLC as my media player.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[ushdfgakj]

Well, flight sims aside, gtkpod (and hopefully an upcoming port of ephpod) are more than adequate. Personally, I prefer Rockbox.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[LWATCDR]

But they don't do apps and RockBox doesn't run on the Touch.
Frankly I love the touch for watching video, as a PDA, and to surf the net.
Now if there was a Linux Distro that ran on the Touch I might put it on but dang the Touch works just too well.
And the flight sims, other games, and CAD means that I do have too reboot into windows which is really too bad. I would love to see iTunes on Linux just to reduce the times I need to reboot.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[ushdfgakj]

Ah, there is, of course, iPodLinux, which will function on the Touch in surely no time. I've been occupying myself heavily lately with Linux games - due to the high degree of generativity inherent to OSS, even one game can offer a seemingly endless supply of entertainment. There are, I should mention, flight sims, and here's a good list of CAD programs for Linux: http://linuxgazette.net/issue54/frost.html. Most games with the Quake/Doom/Marathon/Cube etc. engines will also run on Linux, albeit with some small tweaking at times.\ and finally we finish with a quote from David Lynch about video on the iPhone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[LWATCDR]

For the most part those cad programs are NOT in the same class as SolidWorks or even TurboCad.
FOSS CAD is pretty terrible. No real 3d, just terrible when you look at what a really good package can do.
I have not looked at Varicad in along time. The only really good CAD system I know that runs on Linux is ProE but I can not afford that.
I already have a legal version of Soldworks.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Rysc]

You are saying that the userland should "comply with" GPLv2, implying that the kernel license and the userland license have something to do with one another.

The original poster to whom you replied was commenting that google used the netbsd userland for android because it is under the BSD license, unlike the typical Linux userland which would be GPLv2 or GPLv3 depending on which version you got (and when). What has this to do with the kernel license? That's right! Nothing. So what are you saying if you are not attempting to imply that the license of user space programs must be (or ought to be) compliant with that of the kernel?

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Raenex]

You are saying that the userland should "comply with" GPLv2, implying that the kernel license and the userland license have something to do with one another.

Yes, this is my exact position. Android is a whole made up of parts. It wouldn't be functional without the kernel. When you choose the GPL for parts, you have to make the whole GPL. If you don't understand this then you don't understand the GPL, though that is not surprising as there is an urban myth that GPL only comes into play when explicitly linking. Note that the GPL wisely never talks about anything as specific as linking.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

(Any bold was added by me.)

"You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."

"These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it."

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Rysc]

I am familiar with the GPL and the section you quoted. I don't find your argument convincing. Though android uses Linux and gets some value from that the Linux kernel specifically is not required and does not give android something that another similar kernel would not. There is, as I understand it, an established principle that userspace programs calling public kernel APIs does not constitute derived works under the GPL, I think the FSF has said as much in approximately as many words.

It is in no way necessary for userspace to comply with the kernel's license. Windows apps are not derivative works of the Windows kernel, either.

Unless you're saying that the integration between kernel and non-kernel stuff is significantly different for Android than for a typical Linux setup then I do not believe your points is valid. If that is what you meant you communicated it poorly. If you think that all programs running on Linux in general should be considered derived works then please take your FUD somewhere else.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[Raenex]

Though android uses Linux and gets some value from that the Linux kernel specifically is not required and does not give android something that another similar kernel would not.

But the Linux kernel does provide essential functionality. It doesn't matter that it could be replaced with another implementation. What counts is that the GPL implementation is used and distributed. Reference the "in part contains" which I bolded in my quote of the GPL.

There is, as I understand it, an established principle that userspace programs calling public kernel APIs does not constitute derived works under the GPL, I think the FSF has said as much in approximately as many words.

Again, reference my original quote. "in part contains or is derived". Notice how "contains" is mentioned explicitly, in addition to "derived".

It is in no way necessary for userspace to comply with the kernel's license. Windows apps are not derivative works of the Windows kernel, either.

Poor analogy. Windows apps don't distribute the kernel along with the application. Android is distributed as a complete platform, including the kernel. The only permission given to redistribute the Linux kernel is via the GPL, which must apply to the whole work.

If you think that all programs running on Linux in general should be considered derived works then please take your FUD somewhere else.

When programs are distributed as part of a whole which includes GPL parts, then they must be distributed under the GPL, whether they are derivative or not. When they are distributed separately the GPL need not apply.

Re:I run Debian, and I run FreeBSD.

[xiong.chiamiov]

Next time you try linux, try Arch or Gentoo, as they're probably the closest to FreeBSD in many ways.

Gentoo Did This Years Ago

[MaskedKumquat]

Gentoo managed to get this kind of setup working years ago, didn't they?

Re:Gentoo Did This Years Ago

[binarylarry]

Perhaps, but I'm not sure if it's done compiling yet to test.

Re:Gentoo Did This Years Ago

[disi]

I tested it myself, for a server with no fancy Desktop it compiles very well. Many packages are already tested and get the ~x86-fbsd keyword for installation. Also Sparc+Gentoo+FreeBSD is possible :) disi@disi-desktop ~ $ cat /usr/portage/www-servers/apache/apache-2.2.* | grep bsd KEYWORDS="alpha amd64 arm hppa ia64 ~mips ppc ppc64 s390 sh sparc ~sparc-fbsd x86 ~x86-fbsd" http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-freebsd.xml

Re:Gentoo Did This Years Ago

[niskel]

Tag this article gentoodiditfirst. I saw this in gentoo long ago.

Re:Gentoo Did This Years Ago

[JonasH]

Gentoo managed to get this kind of setup working years ago, didn't they?

So did Debian. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD as the port is poetically named has existed for a long time (see mailing list archives). This story is just about it being accepted as an official part of Debian. Who got there first? Who cares.

Re:Gentoo Did This Years Ago

[Rhabarber]

Yea, it runs on top of Debian, Mac OS X, Solaris and, no joke, Windows. ;)

Re:Gentoo Did This Years Ago

[ivan256]

Debian/Hurd was around before Gentoo existed.

Like Gentoo *BSD, though, it was never an official release.

UbuntuBSD?

[Hes Nikke]

Given that Ubuntu is down stream from Debian, does this mean that I can run the FreeBSD kernel on my Ubuntu install now?

Re:UbuntuBSD?

[ultrabot]

Given that Ubuntu is down stream from Debian, does this mean that I can run the FreeBSD kernel on my Ubuntu install now?

No, just like you won't have Ubuntu for PA-RISC architecture (even if you have Debian for it).

Re:UbuntuBSD?

[RiotingPacifist]

Probably not ubuntu only support a subset of what debian supports.

Re:UbuntuBSD?

[Sonic McTails]

Actually Ubuntu has supported PA-RISC/HPPA for ages:

https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/jaunty/hppa
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/daily/current/

(these are the links for the in-development release Jaunty, but HPPA has been a part of Debian since Breezy).

Re:UbuntuBSD?

[keeboo]

That's correct.
I remember installing Ubuntu 5.10 in an old PA-RISC server (EISA-based).
I remember that after installing that back then, the thing just booted directly to X running gdm, then Gnome entered just fine, as if it were some sort of commodity x86 hardware. Such a strange experience I must say.

Re:UbuntuBSD?

[erayd]

Huh? Gentoo isn't downstream of Debian, it never has been. It's one of the top-level distros in its own right.

Re:UbuntuBSD?

[erayd]

Gaaaa.... someone hand me a brick wall. Ubuntu != Gentoo! Clearly I need to learn to read...

Gentoo was there first

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo has supported the FreeBSD kernel for a while now, afaik

Re:Gentoo was there first

[MBGMorden]

Actually Gentoo has for quite a while had the option of installing all binary packages from a standard LiveCD.

Re:Gentoo was there first

[arodland]

Debian has supported it for a while now too (since 2007, at least) -- it's just that misleading summaries are mandatory on slashdot.

So it it Debian GNU/Linux/FreeBSD

[zonky]

or Debian GNU/FreeBSD or.....? Enquiring minds must know!

Re:So it it Debian GNU/Linux/FreeBSD

[larry bagina]

GNU/FreeBSD. FreeBSD kernel (and libc?) + GNU userland (instead of the BSD userland). There's no linux involved (except perhaps the linux syscall emulation)

Re:So it it Debian GNU/Linux/FreeBSD

[ultrabot]

GNU/FreeBSD. FreeBSD kernel (and libc?) + GNU userland (instead of the BSD userland). There's no linux involved (except perhaps the linux syscall emulation)

So what is the part of the gnu userland that makes it important enough to use in the title of the OS? Compiler?

Re:So it it Debian GNU/Linux/FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU C library

Re:So it it Debian GNU/Linux/FreeBSD

[leprkhn]

I'm calling it GNUBSDEBIAN... or nubs, for short.

Re:So it it Debian GNU/Linux/FreeBSD

[osu-neko]

So what is the part of the gnu userland that makes it important enough to use in the title of the OS? Compiler?

It's not a matter of "what part", it's a matter of "most of the parts". There's no "seat of the soul" for an OS...

Re:So it it Debian GNU/Linux/FreeBSD

[Ian Alexander]

(except perhaps the linux syscall emulation)

Wouldn't you just need to recompile the userland? I use some GNU software on my OpenBSD and FreeBSD installs and they seem to work just dandy without any bother on my part.

Re:So it it Debian GNU/Linux/FreeBSD

[Ilgaz]

But as FreeBSD comes with BSD license, wouldn't it make GNU/BSD Linux? So we lose the OS part and left with a schizoid OS doesn't really know what it is :)

Well, if there is one guy to sort it out, it is RMS. I bet he will end up calling Larry Wall for help.

Re:So it it Debian GNU/Linux/FreeBSD

[binarylarry]

Actually, the official name is:

Richard M Stallman of GNU/FBSD

The FreeBSD part had to be adjusted as the name was getting kind of long.

The more you know. *WINK*

Re:So it it Debian GNU/Linux/FreeBSD

[Tokerat]

But as FreeBSD comes with BSD license, wouldn't it make GNU/BSD Linux?

Erm, no. The Linux kernel is gone.

(GNU/Linux - Linux) + FreeBSD = GNU/FreeBSD

Late to the party, Slashdot.

[iYk6]

Debian has had an unofficial kfreebsd-i386 port for years. It is still an unofficial port.

Re:Late to the party, Slashdot.

[John Hasler]

It just became an official port. That is what is news.

God, I never thought I'd see the day

[palegray.net]

when this image was actually an on-topic response to a Slashdot story.

Re:God, I never thought I'd see the day

[pdabbadabba]

What are you talking about? That is an on-topic response to slashdot stories all the time! ;)

Re:God, I never thought I'd see the day

[hduff]

this image

SON: "What's that BSD fella doing to the Penguin?"

DAD: "Son, the BSD fella is hurt and the penguin is just helpin' him get home."

SON: "Gosh, you try and help another OS and you get fscked!"

This is just really cool

[CestusGW]

It's one thing to sit and think about a beautiful system. To daydream wistfully about interfaces so well-thought that you can swap kernels and userland implementations without the world coming to an end. It's another thing entirely to see it happen with a full featured OS like Debian! Congrats are in order for the Debian team for tackling this and (apparently) going all the way.

for performance?

[bcrowell]

TFA doesn't give much information. It would be interesting to know whether there are some practical reasons to want this. One possibility I can imagine is that if you have a particular task that you want a server to do, you could measure its performance with both kernels. If one is 10% faster than the other, you pick that one. Another possibility would be if you want to test your software to see if it's likely to be portable, or if it contains hidden linuxisms; however, I would expect most of the incompatibilities to be in things like shells and command-line utilities, not the kernel.

Re:for performance?

[psnyder]

It would be interesting to know whether there are some practical reasons to want this.

Why do people want to climb mountains? Because they're there.
Now we can figure out what there is to see from the top!
Congratulations Debian team!

Re:for performance?

[Tokerat]

It would be interesting to know whether there are some practical reasons to want this.

Maybe the FreeBSD kernel has driver support you need that the Linux kernel doesn't... oh wait what am I saying? ;-)

Re:for performance?

[petermgreen]

Another possibility would be if you want to test your software to see if it's likely to be portable, or if it contains hidden linuxisms
You would do much better with a real *bsd system for that. Debian gnu/kfreebsd will find linuxisms but it will not find gnuisms.

APT?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What exactly does it mean to be running Debian with a FreeBSD kernel? Is it essentially just FreeBSD with APT and gnu userland instead of ports and bsd userland?

Re:APT?

[CAIMLAS]

It's hard to say. I imagine it might be possible to run the same userland on top of two separate kernels, but there are certain packages in addition to drivers would need to target specific kernels - namely, Xorg packages, I think. Other than that, as long as the packages are built on the same libraries, and the libraries work with either kernel (or more accurately, there'd be multiple library versions per OS) it should be pretty straight forward.

Re:APT?

[pablomme]

Is it essentially just FreeBSD with APT and gnu userland instead of ports and bsd userland?

It's FreeBSD with the entire Debian userland. AND it's Debian with a FreeBSD kernel. Pretty much like a centaur is a man with a horse's body AND a horse with a human head.

The best description depends on what part you focus on. To me it's Debian with a FreeBSD kernel.

Re:APT?

[drinkypoo]

It means you're running Debian GNU/FreeBSD instead of Debian GNU/Linux. The kernel is just a package. If the FreeBSD can do the things the linux kernel can do, at least well enough to run the userland, then there's no reason the package shouldn't simply satisfy the "system-image" requirement or whatever, and conflict with linux-image.

Re:APT?

[glwtta]

Is it essentially just FreeBSD with APT and gnu userland instead of ports and bsd userland?

So they went from being the Linux with the best package manager to being the BSD with the worst package manager?

Re:APT?

[osu-neko]

So they went from being the Linux with the best package manager to being the BSD with the worst package manager?

They didn't go from anywhere to anywhere. It was the Debian operating system, and it remains the Debian operating system. They now support a different kernel for whatever reasons (some kernels support some hardware or some applications better than others), but as the kernel is a fairly small and minor part of an operating system, it's an interesting bit of news, but they remains the same OS they always were.

BTW, what OSes with BSD support also have a package manager? I take it from your comment that FreeBSD does, but do any of the others? I've used both NetBSD and OpenBSD, and neither had a package manager, just a "ports" automatic source-compiling system. And if, unlike any of the other BSD's I've tried, FreeBSD actually has package management, what makes it better than APT?

Re:APT?

[glwtta]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke

Re:APT?

[ivoras]

Yes, it's a joke but it has an answer too. It might depend on how you define a "package manager" but all BSDs can do:

• Automatic dependency resolving (i.e. install a package, it pulls in its depenancies)
• Package removal (with dependencies)
• Package searching (both installed and available)

And this is not new - it's been there more than 13 years!

Re:APT?

[Tokerat]

Pretty much like a centaur is a man with a horse's body AND a horse with a human head.

That's Two-Things-ism!

Re:APT?

[phoenix_rizzen]

BTW, what OSes with BSD support also have a package manager? I take it from your comment that FreeBSD does, but do any of the others? I've used both NetBSD and OpenBSD, and neither had a package manager, just a "ports" automatic source-compiling system.

FreeBSD has pkg_add, including remote fetching, dependency tracking, and installation.

OpenBSD has a package manager, as well, and they prefer it if you install using packages. The ports tree is only for when you need something not offered by default in the packages. I think it's also called pkg_add, but don't know for sure.

I've never used NetBSD, so I don't know if there's a package installation tool or not.

Re:APT?

[Brandybuck]

It was the Debian operating system, and it remains the Debian operating system.

That's like grafting the head of a nobel prize winning surgeon onto the body of an orang-utan. Does it remain an orang-utan? No! It becomes are crazed and maddened, yet tragically misunderstood, killing machine!

Re:APT?

[kace]

So they went from being the Linux with the best package manager to being the BSD with the worst package manager?

:-D Holy crap! I'm bestowing on you the coveted "(Score:6, Funny as hell)".

Re:APT?

[laffer1]

I direct you to ports-mgmt category in FreeBSD ports or MidnightBSD mports. You will see there are package management tools. Both FreeBSD and MidnightBSD have pkg_add and friends. There's also PC-BSD's PBI system. That's all package based. There are equivalent tools for OpenBSD and NetBSD. It's also possible to use packages in MirBSD (MirOS) with mirports.

To summarize, we've all got them. (DragonFly uses NetBSD pkgsrc)

There's also a project to build new tools for MidnightBSD called mport tools. (libmport is the first stage). You can find the source on GitHub. We're targeting version 1 of these for our next release, 0.3, at the end of the year.

The problem most people have is that the BSDs don't push packages on to users like the Linux community. I think they're a necessity for ease of use, but there is a thrill with customizing and picking features for each compiled port. FreeBSD often has bad pkg-plist files that preclude packages from working properly. We've dealt with that by making our ports system generate packages and install from the package. Some of the other BSDs do something similar. To be fair, freebsd has a decent binary update system for the OS that we do not have. PC-BSD's PBI system generates packages containing all the dependancies for the package so that they can be updated independently without breaking other packages or requiring an insane amount of updates. They don't have a lot of packages though and due to this feature, they are very large.

I suggest you look at the relevant websites and possibly BSD Magazine for more info on the BSDs. The most recent issue covers PBI I think.

Some more info

[Talla]

Is available at http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/

There isn't much, but a little bit in the install notes.

Unofficial ports

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone else has mentioned, the kFreeBSD port has existed unofficially for some time...

You can also run Debian with a HURD kernel. I did that years ago. It was kind of unstable, but an interesting thing to try out for fun. And it largely worked. :-)

Impressive!

[gweihir]

This will also help application interoperability, as fa as such help is still needed...

Switching kernels for one install or?

[kasperd]

So can I install just one system and choose between the two kernels at boot time? Or do you have to make a completely different install with executables build separately for each kernel?

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[Reality Master 201]

It's probably an either/or proposition*, since the system calls and basic libraries aren't the same across the platforms.

*FreeBSD has a kernel level Linux binary compatibility layer, so I guess with enough pain and suffering you could make things switchable, at least with userland stuff.

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[drinkypoo]

Pain and suffering? You mean editing the linker config so that the compat libraries are loaded first?

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[BitZtream]

Disclaimer: I'm a FreeBSD fanboy.

FreeBSD has no problem running Linux binaries, linux binary compatibility has been there for years, I used it to run linux binaries that hadn't yet been ported to FBSD yet in 97, I still run several Linux binaries on my FBSD servers.

For things that don't directly interact with the kernel, FreeBSD will run Linux binaries fine, full syscall emulation is built in with practically 0 cost in most cases. You need the proper Linux libraries available for it all to work, but it will also run ibcs2 binaries so you can throw in SCO and such if you got a license for those libraries!

All it does is emulate the syscall interface to the kernel. FreeBSD and Linux are almost spot on in the way these interfaces work so it can accomplish the task with very little overhead, in many cases its just as efficient as using the native FBSD syscalls. In other cases some structure and memory mangling goes on so it slows down a bit.

FreeBSD is actually capable of running some Linux apps faster than the Linux kernel can. Of course thats simply because those apps happen to agree with the way FreeBSD does things under the hood a little better and not an indication of superior OS, as there are just as many apps that perform worse. As a general rule however, performance is practically identical as running it on a native Linux kernel.

With all that in mind, theres no reason you couldn't switch at boot time if your entire userland was made for the Linux kernel. There would need to be certain parts left as native code such as initd and the like, but you're really just talking about holding duplicate copies of what FBSD stores in /sbin and /bin. Probably just a simple matter of modifing the FBSD kernel and /bin /sbin apps to expect to work from /freebsd/boot,/freebsd/bin,/freebsd/sbin.

Doesn't Linux have this sort of thing? I haven't used Linux in years, I just kind of assumed it did something like this as well. Maybe not for FBSD so much, but I'd expect some ibsc2 support at least.

Finally, doesn't seem like theres much of a point really. FreeBSD is typically considered 'more secure' and has the fastest IP stack on the planet out of the box, but security is mostly a property of userland, kernel level exploits are rather rare now days, its usually a dumb app running with elevated privs that causes the problem so if you're using a Linux userland you aren't gaining that bit (real or imaginary). Linux isn't exactly slow when it comes to networking so unless you're trying to squeeze every last drop out of some hardware that doesn't seem to make it worth the while, might as well stick with what you know and what you know works for you. Just seems silly.

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[Nevyn]

FreeBSD has no problem running Linux binaries, linux binary compatibility has been there for years, I used it to run linux binaries that hadn't yet been ported to FBSD yet in 97, I still run several Linux binaries on my FBSD servers.

Does this actually work 100%? How?

And, yes, I understand you can do syscall emulation. But what about what happens behind the interfaces. For instance I find it hard to believe that TCP_CORK/mremap/epoll/etc. "works" when FreeBSD has refused (decided not to, whatever) to natively support it for years now. AFAIK FBSD doesn't have splice()/tee()/etc. either ... do they hack some of this in userspace?

But even that seems like the easy stuff, what does FBSD do when I open("/proc/*") and start parsing stuff? What about closing sockets that are only referenced in the poll() call of another thread? Anything that hits the drivers "deeply" like X, pulseaudio, etc. seems like it'd be impossible to support. SELinux is just not going to work, probably dito. somewhat releated stuff like the audit interface / netlink (maybe that classifies as "deep" driver knowledge though).

Then there's the really crazy stuff where you have the same interfaces natively but they operate subtley differently in weird corner cases, DJB has a page on some stuff, but I doubt anyone sane enough to have commit privs. knows all of these (if anyone at all does).

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[r00t]

Linux has been getting rid of old syscall emulation features. They are places where security holes can hide. (Got any? Sure?) A few years ago, the call gate (which handles the "far call" instruction) needed for full ibcs2 support got dropped from Linux. For a while though, syscall emulation support was extensive and growing. FreeBSD support almost made it in. Linux could do Solaris x86, SCO, Xenix, Solaris SPARC, OSF/1 for DEC Alpha, and many I've forgotten. System call emulation became much less interesting when all the database vendors suddenly ported to Linux and, for non-x86, when Netscape Navigator became Open Source.

BTW, the idea that FreeBSD has faster networking has been proven false many times. It's no different from the "insecure" reputation that Linux got back in the bad old days when Red Hat shipped with every possible obscure server enabled.

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[MattBurke]

> Does this actually work 100%? How?
No. The only reason I run Debian on my desktop instead of FreeBSD is because I need to use VMWare, which hasn't run under the Linux compat stuff since VMWare Workstation 3, but given that it *did* work once is a bit of a tribute to its completeness.

I spent several years running an extremely busy yet stable Counter-Strike server under Linux compat, which performed significantly better (lower latency, less CPU load) than when running Linux natively on the same hardware. Good times...

> what does FBSD do when I open("/proc/*") and start parsing stuff?
If you've got linprocfs in your kernel and mounted, it should work in most cases.

In general, linux compat stuff works surprisingly well unless you need a high level of kernel interaction such as modern VMWare releases. In 99% of cases It Just Works.

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[lindi]

Syscall "emulation" is a very interesting idea since it will spare us from the archive rebuild and will let the user to just reboot to switch kernels without having to touch userland.

However, last time I tried this I couldn't get gnu screen run. I guess some terminal magic is not implemented in the syscall emulation properly? Can you run gnu screen?

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[synthespian]

Yes, Linux binary emulation actually works. A couple of years ago, the usual Linux ABI breakage - of which they are very proud of - made me unable to use Maple 8 (for which you have to buy an expensive license) on Ubuntu.

I installed FreeBSD and the Linux emulation layer, tweaked some stuff on the Maple side (basically, some scripts) and there you go - Maple ran on FreeBSD with the Linux emulation layer, while it refused to run on Linux itself, whcih it had done, just a release earlier (i.e., a couple of months).

I've tried this on other commercial software and it worked too (but this on a tweak-it-yourself basis).

This emulation layer is great and I wish more people (i.e., commercial software) used it, because you can write software for Linux and get FreeBSD customers, too.

This experience convinced me FreeBSD hackers were a notch higher in skills and experience than their Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, whatever) counterparts.

I've moved to Mac OS X since but still hang on to my FreeBSD. Don't want Linux anymore, thank you.

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[BitZtream]

If you read the next line you will see the answer to your question:

For things that don't directly interact with the kernel, FreeBSD will run Linux binaries fine, full syscall emulation is built in with practically 0 cost in most cases.

FreeBSD uses the native Linux libraries to facilitate the emulation and only has to deal with kernel differences. Obviously there are differences and some things won't work perfectly, most normal apps that a user is going to care about will. As will most server apps.

What about closing sockets that are only referenced in the poll() call of another thread?

Uhm the same thing that happens in Linux? poll() isn't unique to Linux, other OSes have it too.

X doesn't really hit the kernel that deeply, and where it does, you just have a kernel module to support your video card, X is already adapt at dealing with this on FreeBSD why would you have any reason to think it doesn't work? The OSes aren't nearly as different as you would like to think.

No, its not perfect emulation. Neither is VMware, Xen, VirtualBox or the other machine emulators. Emulators are never perfect, there are always problems when emulating. Stop being a douche bag and make it out to be more than it is.

Considering the number of shitty open source apps out there that core half the time when they are running under the OS they were built for, I seriously doubt you'll notice if your precious shitty app crashes any more on a FBSD kernel under emulation.

People have been running Linux binaries under FBSD for over 10 years, which is longer than most of the virtualization machine emulators have been in existence. They didn't come up with it yesterday and they've worked out most of the kinks.

I could come up with plenty of apps that will break if I tried, but I can do that for pretty much every emulator out there. As I said in another post, apps that are tightly involved with the kernel will probably have kernel specific builds, you won't need that many, but things like /boot /bin and /sbin are definitely going to be kernel specific.

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[Nevyn]

What about closing sockets that are only referenced in the poll() call of another thread?

Uhm the same thing that happens in Linux? poll() isn't unique to Linux, other OSes have it too.

Maybe this was too vague. If you close a socket that is only referenced in poll, then on Linux it behaves as if you closed the socket just after poll() returned (ie. nothing happens) and on FreeBSD IIRC it behaves as if you closed the socket just before you called poll (poll() call returns immediately with EINVAL for that fd).

This kind of thing would be almost impossible to make behave identically, under an emulated syscall. Nevermind, the comment by Matt Burke answered my question.

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[CAPSLOCK2000]

FreeBSD is actually capable of running some Linux apps faster than the Linux kernel can.

While this was true for a limited number of applications roughly ten years ago, I doubt this is still the case for any realistic workload.

Don't get me wrong, I like FreeBSD, but I'm getting a little bit tired of hearing the same outdated arguments over and over again.

For the record, while on (slightly) topic, the MS-Windows TCP/IP stack is NOT based on BSD. It borrowed a bit a long time ago, and some utilities for a bit longer, but there is no kernel code in any recent Windows version.

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[kasperd]

A couple of years ago, the usual Linux ABI breakage - of which they are very proud of - made me unable to use Maple 8

The ABI changes in Linux only affects kernel internals. If an application needs its very own kernel modules to work, then I'd avoid that application. And the possibility that it might break when internal kernel ABI changes, is not the main reason I would want to avoid it.

Re:Switching kernels for one install or?

[cbart387]

I think you stopped reading a couple sentences to early.

Emphasis is mine.

FreeBSD is actually capable of running some Linux apps faster than the Linux kernel can. Of course thats simply because those apps happen to agree with the way FreeBSD does things under the hood a little better and not an indication of superior OS, as there are just as many apps that perform worse. As a general rule however, performance is practically identical as running it on a native Linux kernel.

Re:And by "support" you mean..

[DECS]

Darwin is a hybrid kernel that uses low level elements of Mach paired with higher level elements of BSD, not two different kernels.

However, NeXT developed OpenStep as a universal operating system environment that actually ran in production on Solaris, the Win NT kernel + OS, as well as the Mach/BSD kernel ported to various hardware.

Apple planned to port that layer on top of the Mac OS too (providing a Yellow Box that could run like Java anywhere), then realized it made more sense to use Mach/BSD and port the Mac appearance on top of OpenStep, and ended up making enough modifications to kill any backward compatibility with the OpenStep specification.

That's what Mac OS X is.

Why OS X is on the iPhone, but not the PC

I love what that symbolizes!

[r00t]

FreeBSD fans created that image, but...

1. It shows that FreeBSD is gay.

2. It leaves no doubt why FreeBSD is represented by Satan.

Clearly, this is why we must stay away from FreeBSD.

Re:I love what that symbolizes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nagh, it just means that Tux is a pussy :)

Re:I love what that symbolizes!

[Higher Authority]

Who says Tux isn't female, or that Beastie isn't raping Linux as an expression of power, as opposed to sexual preference?

Re:I love what that symbolizes!

[Hal_Porter]

Sigh.

Re:I love what that symbolizes!

[Brandybuck]

Just because there aren't chains or ball gags does not mean that Tux isn't consenting. Maybe the penguin likes to be dominated!

ZFS support

[Beve Jates]

Hmmm, I think this would be an interesting way to finally get real ZFS support in a Linux-like system.

Unfortunately FreeBSD is much more limited in terms of modern software technologies like virtualization, hardware drivers, etc. Linux is way ahead there so I guess this is still not that great. Interesting though.

Re:ZFS support

[smash]

Most hardware supported by linux is supported. JAILs mean less requirement for virtualization.

Personally though, I can't see the point.

The unified FreeBSD userland is what makes it so great, rather than some cobbled together collection of GNU shit, written by a hundred different people who decide that manpages aren't good enough, to use info instead and hence, there is never any current documentation.

"OMG but you can apt-get stuff". Who gives a shit. pkg_add -r does basically the same thing anyway, and "cd /usr/ports/xxx/foobarport && make package" makes a lot more sense to me than the commands required on linux to build packages...

Don't get me wrong, as far as LINUX goes, its debian for me. I just don't see the requirement to have a shitty GNU userland on the FreeBSD system.

Re:ZFS support

[pablomme]

I just don't see the requirement to have a shitty GNU userland on the FreeBSD system.

What do you mean? Every GNU tool I've used is far better than its BSD counterpart (if it exists). Some manpages do suck, but I've never failed to find the information I need for any command that is remotely complicated.

In any case, if the Debian maintainers shared your opinion of the BSD userland, they would try to get that into their standard Linux-based distribution, rather than wait to have the FreeBSD kernel to do that there.

Re:ZFS support

[evilviper]

Every GNU tool I've used is far better than its BSD counterpart

Really? Hmmm...

http://evilviper.nstemp.com/BASH-SUCKS.png

Thank god for the OpenBSD version of ksh. With mksh it was made portable and can be installed on practically any Unix system. It features practically every BASH feature human beings could ever use, while being a tiny fraction of the size.

And how about FreeBSD's tar? No -z -Z -j crap... use any of the flags, and whatever compression method used will be detected and handled.

How about "ps -ax" bitching at you not to type the dash (which every other Unix system requires), or "bc" printing a dozen lines of the GPL every time you start it up?

Or how about just the fact that nearly every GPL binary is 4X the size of any of the BSD equivalents?

There's thousands more examples, I just haven't written them all up, and just listed a handful off the top of my head. Why don't you start trying to list a few ways YOU'VE find GNU utilities to be any better than their BSD counterparts?

Re:ZFS support

[SLi]

What do you mean? Every GNU tool I've used is far better than its BSD counterpart (if it exists). Some manpages do suck, but I've never failed to find the information I need for any command that is remotely complicated.

In any case, if the Debian maintainers shared your opinion of the BSD userland, they would try to get that into their standard Linux-based distribution, rather than wait to have the FreeBSD kernel to do that there.

Indeed. We have Solaris and *BSD machines at our university (in addition to the Linux ones), and yeah, give me the GNU userland and I'll consider them usable. It seems to me that the BSD userland hasn't been touched for like 15 years to support any new ideas, and still they keep up the propaganda about a better userland.

I find the grandparent's bitching about man pages especially funny considering that 1) I think the GNU manpages are way better than the BSD ones; 2) even more importantly, the BSD tools lack decent --help, often that tells you exactly what you want to use.

Compare the --help of a simple tool like GNU cat:

$ cat --help
Usage: cat [OPTION]... [FILE]...
Concatenate FILE(s), or standard input, to standard output.

    -A, --show-all equivalent to -vET
    -b, --number-nonblank number nonempty output lines
    -e equivalent to -vE
    -E, --show-ends display $ at end of each line
    -n, --number number all output lines
    -s, --squeeze-blank suppress repeated empty output lines
    -t equivalent to -vT
    -T, --show-tabs display TAB characters as ^I
    -u (ignored)
    -v, --show-nonprinting use ^ and M- notation, except for LFD and TAB
            --help display this help and exit
            --version output version information and exit

With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

Examples:
    cat f - g Output f's contents, then standard input, then g's contents.
    cat Copy standard input to standard output.

to that of the BSD one:

$ cat -h
cat: illegal option -- h
usage: cat [ -usvtebn ] [-|file] ...

Sure, that's helpful.

Re:ZFS support

[bonch]

Every GNU tool I've used is far better than its BSD counterpart (if it exists).

"Far better?" Do you have an example? Generally, there's a feeling among BSD users that their tools are superior in quality and documentation. The man pages as well as the handbook are fantastic and explain everything you'd want to know. It's like you get an actual manual with your new UNIX-based workstation.

There are efforts to replace the non-modular GCC because FSF purposely obfuscated it to prevent people from easily making extensions (something Slashdotters would criticize if a commercial company had done). Goofy crap like that is poor quality software and poor attitude that more practical users have no time for.

Re:ZFS support

[SLi]

Why don't you start trying to list a few ways YOU'VE find GNU utilities to be any better than their BSD counterparts?

I'm not the parent, but here you go:

- The BSD -h (--help) is a joke for almost every command. It gives you something like "usage: cat [-benstuv] [file ...]" with zero explanation what each of the switches do. Or "usage: ls [-ABCFGHILPRSTUWZabcdfghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]". Very helpful.

- GNU userland supports the things one might want to do. The BSD tools just don't have the features. Like, last time I wanted to teach my students to use apropos to find system calls, I told them to use apropos -s 2. Well, turned out some of them decided to use the BSD machines here, and apparently there's no such thing on the BSD apropos. Not only that but it doesn't have a --help or a -h at all. Missing features like this are truly pervasive in the BSD land. I hit them nearly every time I want to do something more exotic on a BSD.

Small things like

- BSD tar lacks the jz switches. Seriously. I want them.

- And for that matter, bash is the best shell I've seen. Yes, I've tried ksh.

The BSD kernel I can take (although I don't see the advantage compared to Linux), but I do want the GNU userland to consider the system even half-usable.

Re:ZFS support

[Lars512]

"OMG but you can apt-get stuff". Who gives a shit. pkg_add -r does basically the same thing anyway, and "cd /usr/ports/xxx/foobarport && make package" makes a lot more sense to me than the commands required on linux to build packages...

My experiences with FreeBSD give me the impression that apt is worlds ahead of pkg_add, in the same way that Gentoo's portange is worlds ahead of BSD ports, both in terms of robustness and usability.

Without knowing the details, I get the impression that both apt and portage both came later and benefited from starting from scratch, whereas the BSD experience is perhaps too difficult for maintainers to improve now.

This is actually a big deal; the main reason I choose one distro over another is package support.

Re:ZFS support

[RazzleDazzle]

Dont forget the ssh command. Oh wait, there is no real non BSD version of that tool. hahaha... openssh, putting insecure logins to rest since 1999

Re:ZFS support

[pablomme]

Thank god for the OpenBSD version of ksh. With mksh it was made portable and can be installed on practically any Unix system. It features practically every BASH feature human beings could ever use, while being a tiny fraction of the size.

Bash and ksh are quite on par feature-wise, so pick whichever one you prefer since both are available on GNU and BSD systems. However this misses the GNU-vs-BSD point, as do you -- if anything, you should be comparing bash against tcsh which is the default shell in FreeBSD. Is there such a thing as a BSD shell anyway?

And how about FreeBSD's tar? No -z -Z -j crap... use any of the flags, and whatever compression method used will be detected and handled.

From the GNU tar manpage (which, it may surprise you, is actually useful):

-a, --auto-compress
    with --create, selects compression algorithm basing on the suffix of
    the archive file name

So it's there, as an option. And IMO it makes better sense as an option than as default behaviour.

How about "ps -ax" bitching at you not to type the dash (which every other Unix system requires),

Again from a GNU manpage:

Note that "ps -aux" is distinct from "ps aux". The POSIX and UNIX standards require that "ps -aux" print all processes owned by a user named "x", as well as printing all processes that would be selected by the -a option. If the user named "x" does not exist, this ps may interpret the command as "ps aux" instead and print a warning.

That is, BSD ps has a given syntax ('ps aux') and "conveniently" ignores any dash preceding the options ('ps -aux'=='ps aux'). This clashes with POSIX standards. GNU ps not only supports its own POSIXly correct syntax and the strict BSD syntax, but it also correctly catches things like 'ps -aux', issues a warning and runs the command you intended to run. And you complain?

"bc" printing a dozen lines of the GPL every time you start it up?

If a dozen is three, then yes. It doesn't do that when you pipe into it, which is all that matters in practice.

Or how about just the fact that nearly every GPL binary is 4X the size of any of the BSD equivalents?

I don't see how that's to do with anything other than how the binaries were compiled?

Why don't you start trying to list a few ways YOU'VE find GNU utilities to be any better than their BSD counterparts?

GNU make is a great example, because it's obviously immensely superior to all other implementations of make.

Other than little personal annoyances, you've listed nothing much. Try comparing manpages side by side and let me know when you find a single *feature* in a BSD tool that is not in a GNU tool. Starting by the ones you mentioned above.

Re:ZFS support

[Galactic Dominator]

- BSD tar lacks the jz switches. Seriously. I want them.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tar&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+7.1-RELEASE+and+Ports&format=html

Do you see the -jz switches, cause I sure do. Maybe you could get a clue before you're put in a position of "teaching". Another sad mark reflecting the lack of rigor in our educational standards. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

Also on bsd utilities, -h(if it exists) assumes you have some basic knowledge of the command. Otherwise that is what man(1) is for.

In response to you syscall bs, you can reference this file: /usr/src/sys/kern/syscalls.master or this one for linux syscalls: /usr/src/sys/i386/linux/syscalls.master. Wow even easier than apropos returning jumbled garbage. Imagine that. I'm also going to share a really special trick, you can even use grep(or other utils) on those files to return specific info you're targeting.

Horatio, one of us here doesn't know what the fuck we're talking about and I'm betting it's not me.

Re:ZFS support

[flnca]

What's the problem with typing "man ls" to read the manual? The BSDs at least come with all necessary manpages preinstalled. No searching for manpage packages. Every package you install automatically includes the manpages. And graphical manpage browsers like the good old "xman" have some use as well, especially when browsing for system calls ...

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

[flnca]

The difference between the BSD ports system and the Linux package management systems is that BSD ports are compiled natively. After using FreeBSD and OpenBSD for years, I found that the ports system does have its uses. Precompiled packages have the advantage that they can be installed right away. The ports system has the disadvantage that the default options selected for a package might not be the best choice. I often found myself editing some file before compiling a port. But the clear advantage of the solution is that options that do exist are often unavailable on systems that depend on prepackaging (like most Linux distros). The BSD package managers are OK, but they do indeed lack some features often found in Linux package managers (like auto-deletion of related packages). It is in any case advisable to read the FreeBSD manual chapters for the ports collection and the package management system. Both have their uses, advantages and disadvantages. The BSDs have become a lot simpler to use in the past years, and progress is being made everywhere just like in the Linux world. But if you want a "real UNIX", BSD is a much better choice. At least it doesn't claim it's not UNIX, like GNU does! ;-) Once you get OpenBSD to run to your liking, for instance, you'll know this system will run forever, and you'll know exactly which files to modify to get what you want. For instance, OpenBSD uses XDM which is easy to write session scripts for. I have written a couple of small programs that allow me to choose the window or desktop manager after logging in. It's fun! ;-)

Re:ZFS support

[smash]

What do I mean? If you want the GNU userland, run Linux.

If you want something more unix like, run FreeBSD.

The "GNU userland" niche is already filled by Linux, HURD, etc. I'm saying its a waste of time and effort that could be better spent elsewhere.

Re:ZFS support

[tyrione]

Then you've got BSD Man pages in OS X 10.5.

http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/cat/osx-10.5.php

http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/hdiutil/

If these aren't robust enough for you nothing will help.

Re:ZFS support

[evilviper]

- The BSD -h (--help) is a joke for almost every command. It gives you something like "usage: cat [-benstuv] [file ...]" with zero explanation what each of the switches do.

Yeah, that's absolutely terrible... So much worse than the GNU -h option:

$ cat -h
cat: invalid option -- h
Try `cat --help' for more information.

$ cat --version
cat (GNU coreutils) 6.9
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Clearly, the BSD version SHOULDN'T tell you what options are available... That would make it more GNU like, and clearly superior.

I told them to use apropos -s 2. Well, turned out some of them decided to use the BSD machines here, and apparently there's no such thing on the BSD apropos.

apropos on my Slack 12.1 Linux box doesn't have an -s option at all either...

$ apropos -s 2
apropos: -s: unknown option
$ apropos -V
apropos from man-1.6f

- BSD tar lacks the jz switches. Seriously. I want them.

WTF? Of course BSD tar HAS the j and z switches. No idea where you got that idea.

- And for that matter, bash is the best shell I've seen. Yes, I've tried ksh.

I've demonstrated where BASH blows up completely... You've given NO reason to justify your claim. No doubt something else you've imagined that's completely wrong...

Re:ZFS support

[evilviper]

Dont forget the ssh command. Oh wait, there is no real non BSD version of that tool.

Sure there is... fressh, or some such. One more of Stallman's idealogically driven pet projects done in a huff, to show the superiority of the GPL... Of course it's a pretty lousy SSH implementation that nobody uses, with plenty of holes popping up, but it does exist. Let's not exaggerate.

The same is true of GNUTLS versus OpenSSL.

Re:ZFS support

[MadAhab]

Right on.

Never mind that Linux wants you to use j for bzip2 in tar.

And I can hardly forget years of bitching from nslookup to use dig instead. Good lord. Sometimes I use nslookup, sometimes dig, sometimes host, depends what I'm doing. I don't need a fucking lecture.

Re:ZFS support

[r00t]

Name more than one Unix system that follows that particular POSIX standard then.

OK, how about all of them? You can't use "ps -ax" on any real UNIX system. You fail on all these UNIX systems: IRIX, UnixWare, Solaris, HP-UX, Unicos, PowerMAXX. You also fail on OSF systems: Tru64, AIX. Finally, you fail on numerous other POSIX and UNIX-standard systems: Interix, Dynix/ptx, S/390 Open Edition. You're 100% FAIL.

And you've not bothered to list a single reason why gmake is supposedly superior, at all.

I'll list a few: working VPATH, eval, double dollar sign variables, pattern substitution, automatic restart when the makefile pulls in fresh generated makefile code, etc.

Re:ZFS support

[mokus000]

What a bitter little person. That's all I have to say about that.

Re:ZFS support

[mokus000]

2) even more importantly, the BSD tools lack decent --help, often that tells you exactly what you want to use.

This whole debate is pretty stupid, but I'd like to point out anyway that "better" does not mean the same to everyone. In the case of --help, I have a lot of sympathy for the way BSD commands generally do it. When I type "-h" or "--help", I'd much rather see a simple list of options that exist, because I generally already know what I want, just can't remember precisely what it's called.

In fact, I find it annoying that there's no standard way (that I know of anyway) to get just a short listing of what's available. tar --help (on at least one of my linux systems) spits out 270 lines. If I wanted to fire up a pager and read a man page, I'd have typed "man".

Re:ZFS support

[pablomme]

I see you repeatedly dismissed any points you can't argue with. Nicely done.

Such as?

Why TCSH? What makes the FreeBSD defaults representative of all of BSD land, all of a sudden?

Why not? You compare the GNU shell against a random shell and I can't pick a random BSD flavour to make the comparison fairer?

Is there such a thing as a BSD shell anyway?

Well, since what's now MKSH couldn't even be compiled on any platform other than OpenBSD for many YEARS, I think, yes, it qualifies if anything does...

Quoting yourself: "With mksh it was made portable and can be installed on practically any Unix system.".

Portable, but it can't be compiled on anything other than BSD...

You're clearly stretching to justify the pointless, useless, incompatible, and annoying behavior.

You fail to see that what you find annoying is the fact that it is ultracompatible, unlike all non-GNU versions of ps. You find it annoying that typing the wrong command --which you are-- gives you a warning, and even then it runs. Really, I'm stretching here...

It doesn't do that when you pipe into it, which is all that matters in practice.

Gee. Thanks for telling me how I'm supposed to use my computer. Much appreciated.

And every time I need to do some quick math, do I have to write a script for it now? Because that's "all that matters"?

Erm, what? What I'm saying is that it would be wrong for bc to print a header, large or small, when you're using it within a script. In interactive mode, no, it doesn't matter if it prints four lines of header (1 for version number + 3 for GPL warranty). This just proves that you get easily annoyed, nothing more.

I don't see how that's to do with anything other than how the binaries were compiled?

Well then, you apparently know absolutely nothing about any form of programming... This does explain quite a bit, really.

Right, 'course I don't...

GNU make is a great example, because it's obviously immensely superior to all other implementations of make.

Actually it's pretty horrible. It merely works most of the time because it's been around since before Linux, and used on so many systems where the proprietary version of make was horrendous, that EVERYTHING is coded with GMakes bugs and quirks in-mind.

Have you noticed that cdrtools always complains when you use GMake, and recommends the use of anything else? Not to say that BSD make should be used... smaller target audience and all that...

Besides, you've proven pretty well you know nothing about programming at all. And you've not bothered to list a single reason why gmake is supposedly superior, at all.

Yeah, right. Come back when you've written a set of makefiles for a large project that work with GNU make, BSD make, SunOS make and Tru64 make at the same time, supporting different architectures, compilers, optional library overrides, etc. I have, and what I can tell you is that the only thing GNU make does wrong is that it spoils you for options. Other make systems are simply underfeatured.

That's almost funny. Pretty much the only thing a GNU man page has ever told anyone about anything, is that they should be using "info" instead, if they want to get ANY information on the program...

Way to avoid my point.

BSD tools are underfeatured with respect to their GNU counterparts. Prove the opposite if you can.

There, spelled out clearly.

Re:ZFS support

[pablomme]

That is a fair point.

Re:ZFS support

[Junta]

POSIX is most definitely not the be all end all of how a Unix system should act

While it does not encompass the entirety of a platform, it is *something* to keep in mind and implement, warning users when usage runs afowl of POSIX standards. I've seen in the community where they disagree with what POSIX prescribes, but implement it that way because adherence to standards is an important differentiator between the *nix world and certain other platforms...

And every time I need to do some quick math, do I have to write a script for it now? Because that's "all that matters"?

His point was that the output wouldn't screw up scripts. The implicit assumption is that someone isn't horribly bothered by the banner interactively. If it would bother you so much, aliasing bc to 'bc -q' would solve your nitpick, though it is not obvious to some people that the application started since it gives no prompt. I personally prefer python as a quick calculator myself anyway (except some base conversions which are quicker in bc to type)

That's almost funny. Pretty much the only thing a GNU man page has ever told anyone about anything, is that they should be using "info" instead, if they want to get ANY information on the program...

Usually, I do a man on a GNU utility and get a generally typical man page. It most likely contains the info I need, with a small 'see also' section that says to go to info for full documentation, which generally contains volumes of incredibly verbose documentation I would rarely need, moreso than any man page except maybe bash...

Re:ZFS support

[godrik]

or "bc" printing a dozen lines of the GPL every time you start it up?

alias bc='bc -q'

problem solved

Re:ZFS support

[skeeto]

It features practically every BASH feature human beings could ever use, while being a tiny fraction of the size.

I am not sure which size you are talking about. If it is the binary size, then on my system (Debian) stripped ksh is 1108044 bytes, and stripped bash is 730856. ksh is bigger here. If we are looking at the process size (and if I am measuring this right), a fresh ksh takes up 831 pages and a fresh bash takes up 975 pages. Hardly a "tiny fraction" in that case.

If we are talking about code base, then you are probably right. I don't feel like checking right now.

I can see why you don't like bash, though. I am getting annoyed with it recently too, especially after the new "smart" auto-completion arrived.

Re:ZFS support

[psydeshow]

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.

I take it you don't upgrade Apache, MySQL, and PHP very often?

Using ports is kinda okay when setting up a new server. You expect it to take a few hours. But the fifth or sixth time you have to recompile MySQL you start thinking there might be better things to do with your life.

#apt-get dist-upgrade and you're done in five minutes.

Re:ZFS support

[BitZtream]

http://www.freebsddiary.org/portupgrade.php

Not really that hard. Just like the first time you figured out how to upgrade with apt you probably did it because you googled or someone told you how, you should have googled 'freebsd port upgrade' as the first link goes right to a page that tells you how to do it with the least pain and suffering.

The system also has mergemaster for dealing with changes associated with OS upgrades like /etc updates and the like.

portupgrade does the same thing for ports, as well as making sure you upgrade all the dependencies and the like so everything works when done.

You can, of course, just like with apt, use the binary packages instead of recompiling everything.

And most of us DON'T upgrade apache, mysql or php often. In a production environment you upgrade when you have a reason to, not because there is a new version.

FreeBSD isn't hard to use, its just different, if you don't put any effort into learning the differences and just assume everything should work like it did with a Linux distro, then you are the one who failed, not the OS. If you want it to act just like Linux then why are you trying FreeBSD?

Re:ZFS support

[evilviper]

You compare the GNU shell against a random shell and I can't pick a random BSD flavour to make the comparison fairer?

I compared BASH against the included OpenBSD shell.

Shall we compare TCSH against ASH? Or Perhaps ZSH? If you get to pick the BSD shell in question, I get to pick the GPL shell...

Portable, but it can't be compiled on anything other than BSD...

I'm not sure if you're just feigning ignorance, or if you're genuinely stupid. Either way...

The OpenBSD ksh shell was around for many years before the MirBSD took ksh and made it portable.

Goodbye.

Re:ZFS support

[evilviper]

You can't use "ps -ax" on any real UNIX system.

A few proprietary systems do support it. Those which you've listed, and pretty much ALL that fail on ps -ax DON'T support the POSIX-compliant behavior, either, so it's a complete red herring.

Re:ZFS support

[pablomme]

Bye!

Re:ZFS support

[evilviper]

More importantly, OpenSSH is not something invented by the OpenBSD folds, it is a fork of SSH version 1 by SSH Communications Security

It started out that way, but it's been an extremely long time since it had any resemblance to the original SSH program. They certainly implemented SSHv2 on their own, and in ways completely different than SSH.com (Tectia) chose to, and IMHO far superior. In fact, I'd dare say most people have NEVER used the SSHv1 protocol, as SSHv2 has long been the default in OpenSSH, and practically every bit of software made in this century (literally) supports it.

Re:ZFS support

[evilviper]

stripped ksh is 1108044 bytes, and stripped bash is 730856. ksh is bigger here.

You're apparently using some other implementation of ksh, and not the one in question (OpenBSD KSH or MKSH).

Here, I have Ksh compiled STATIC, and Bash3 dynamic (linking to a handful of libs), and Bash is still twice the size. (600k vs 300k) Dynamic versions (depending only on libc, not the handful of libs Bash needs) of ksh/mksh are close to 200k. Your binary of Bash is larger still...

http://www.mirbsd.org/?mksh

Re:ZFS support

[smash]

Lol, typical /. moderation. I don't agree and have a bug in my arse = troll moderate.

Re:ZFS support

[smash]

FreeBSD isn't hard to use, its just different, if you don't put any effort into learning the differences and just assume everything should work like it did with a Linux distro, then you are the one who failed, not the OS. If you want it to act just like Linux then why are you trying FreeBSD?

Because like a typical linux noob who's been on board for about 18 months, he hasn't even tried FreeBSD, but just assumes that "Debian = bettah!" because thats all he knows (somewhat).

And yes, in a real world server environment, you upgrade stuff only when you have to - either security updates, bug fixes, or hardware upgrades.

I've just recently decomissioned a FreeBSD 4.x server that was exposed to the internet as a VPN server; due to the hardened configuration it ran just fine for the last 6 years with minimal maintenance.

Re:ZFS support

[flydpnkrtn]

Just point out his mistakes man, jesus... you don't have to attack his profession.

Teaching is a difficult career choice to say the least...

Re:ZFS support

[Galactic Dominator]

That's interesting since OP(in relation to conversation) went out of their way to spread misinformation about base of my profession. Any single point of misinformation presented would take a negligible amount of time to actually look up, and I seriously did find it disheartening to see an educator say those things.

From my perspective, the OP is either guilty of gross negligence or lying. In my book, being guilty of either calls for harsh consequences. Hopefully, the OP or a reader somewhere will take the lesson to not post a supposed fact without having some background in the area first. If so, then from my point of view, my being an asshole paid dividends and the world is a better place for it.

Also for what it's worth, I'm typically much more personable when it comes to "helping" others, it's just that such ignorance in the above is unpalatable to me.

Re:ZFS support

[ion.simon.c]

You have heard of Cmake? If you haven't looked at it, you probably should.

Re:ZFS support

[ion.simon.c]

And I can hardly forget years of bitching from nslookup to use dig instead.

Eh?

$ nslookup google.com
Server: 130.160.254.30
Address: 130.160.254.30#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: google.com
Address: 74.125.45.100
Name: google.com
Address: 209.85.171.100
Name: google.com
Address: 74.125.67.100

$ equery b nslookup
[ Searching for file(s) nslookup in *... ]
net-dns/bind-tools-9.6.0_p1 (/usr/bin/nslookup)
$

Re:ZFS support

[flnca]

Thanks. I'll see to it. Tools like CMake cannot solve the underlying problem however: The non-existence of a standard API that is upward compatible to previous versions. The GNU build system encouraged proliferation of incompatible interfaces. I only need to look at the size of such tools like CMake to know the extent of the problem. Many UNIX applications are written in Java and C# nowadays to circumvent the problem a little, but even there it exists. Doth man ever learn from the past?

Re:ZFS support

[ion.simon.c]

The non-existence of a standard API that is upward compatible to previous versions.

What API are you talking about?
If you're talking about the zillion versions of automake and friends (and the two different behaviours of cmake), then that's a symptom of an evolving design. There's nothing that can be done about that. We're not omniscient and are unable to correctly anticipate every possible need of the users of our software.
Or are you talking about the numerous sanity and feature-presence checks that cmake and autotools much do due to differing APIs and software loads between various platforms and sites? There's an easy way to deal with that... target a single platform and software load. :)

Many UNIX applications are written in Java and C#

I haven't seen this. The apps on my system are written in one of: C, Python, Perl, C++, Ruby, Java. (I have exactly one Java application on my systems: Azureus (nee Vuze).)
Regardless, how does moving away from C/C++ to Java resolve this "standard API" issue that you're talking about? Perhaps a more specific definition of "standard API" would be helpful.

Re:ZFS support

[flnca]

What API are you talking about? (...) are you talking about the numerous sanity and feature-presence checks that cmake and autotools much do due to differing APIs and software loads between various platforms and sites?

Exactly that. Hundreds of thousands up to millions of different API functions exported by ten thousands of libraries in their many (often incompatible) versions. There must be a consolidation of some sort someday, a convergence towards a predictable set of APIs. This is already happening, but at the current pace it will take years or decades to complete.

There's an easy way to deal with that... target a single platform and software load.

That's not an option if a program must be portable.

I haven't seen this. The apps on my system are written in one of: C, Python, Perl, C++, Ruby, Java. (I have exactly one Java application on my systems: Azureus (nee Vuze).)

Then you've missed out on the recent software industry trend towards C# even on Unix platforms (through Mono, a .NET clone).

Regardless, how does moving away from C/C++ to Java resolve this "standard API" issue that you're talking about? Perhaps a more specific definition of "standard API" would be helpful.

API = application programming interface
Standard API = standard application programming interface

As of now, there are a few select development environments that meet these criteria to some extent: Shell scripts (KSH et al), Perl, PHP, JavaScript (in web browsers), Java, and C#. This is because the languages and their libraries are more or less standardized, varying only little between versions (but even that can be a portability hurdle).

The C and C++ have been standardized too late a point in time, and the shock waves are still perceivable. Only in the past few years, compilers like GCC reached halfways compliance with C and C++ standards. Especially on UNIX-like systems, adoption of standards has been slow. Add to that the ineptitude of the standards comittees to provide standard libraries for vital aspects of real-world programming like multithreading and graphical user interfaces. Merely C/C++ bindings to existing standards in these parts would have been sufficient, perhaps with a reference implementation.

I've been working with C since 1986 and with C++ since 1992, and I have seen plenty of changes. It is funny how slow things can evolve in this fast-paced industry.

Re:ZFS support

[ion.simon.c]

There must be a consolidation of some sort someday, a convergence towards a predictable set of APIs.

I don't see why. I don't even see how this could be possible without ossifying the field of computer science. Consider the mythical US patent examiner who declared that the office should shut down very soon, as everything to be discovered already had been and no new innovations would be possible... in the 1800's. If you force convergence towards a single set of APIs for everything, you destroy any usefulness that the study of computer science and its related fields can offer.

Having said that, we already have a set of standard APIs for threading and most OS-level operations. It's called POSIX. :) Does every *nix support all of it? No. But they all support it better than Win32 does.

Finally, we've had a standard windowing system (and associated GUI toolkit) since late 1987. It's called X11. I don't understand why Apple and MSFT decided to reinvent the wheel. ;)

Re:ZFS support

[flnca]

If you force convergence towards a single set of APIs for everything, you destroy any usefulness that the study of computer science and its related fields can offer.

How so? The API (the interface) does not prescribe how its implemented. Implementation can always vary.

Furthermore, new APIs can be considered at any time. However, a standard interface never changes in a way that breaks compatibility.

Having said that, we already have a set of standard APIs for threading and most OS-level operations. It's called POSIX. :) Does every *nix support all of it? No. But they all support it better than Win32 does.

POSIX conformance is not just a matter of supporting a specific function, but also if the function behaves according to the standard. On GNU, Linux, et al., this is still being worked on.

Not so long ago, Linux provided a poor implementation of the POSIX standards (especially regarding threads, signals, and asynchronous I/O), and was far behind BSD, Solaris and AIX. Solaris too suffered from many problems. For some years, AIX was the only UNIX-like OS that I've seen that provided a reasonable implementation of these features. BSD also seemed pretty good when I used it for some years. Gladly for us developers, Linux has been catching up in the past years, however. Manual pages have been cleaned up to provide less misleading information also, a good development.

The POSIX subsystem of Windows is (like Windows) of poor quality, and is not fully installed by default. I still remember the times when fork() didn't work (don't know if they fixed it). Methinks, Microsoft should throw out their proprietary kernels and use a UNIX-like kernel (a BSD, Linux, or Mach kernel). The Windows program loader and task scheduler still have some serious defects (as of Windows Vista). Like, it's not possible to terminate a process cleanly from the outside (disrupts DLL reference counters, for instance), programs are loaded in whole (leading to catastrophic performance during startup), and the task scheduler often switches away from a process for a long time (often with 50 ms delay whereas on Linux it's below the 1 ms granularity level), which makes it difficult to write timing sensitive applications on Windows.

Finally, we've had a standard windowing system (and associated GUI toolkit) since late 1987. It's called X11. I don't understand why Apple and MSFT decided to reinvent the wheel. ;)

Me neither! ;)

Microsoft made some grave mistakes during the 80ies, which are still affecting us today. Like, a virtual machine (while slow at that time), could have provided 32-bit environments already on 16-bit CPUs (a lesson learnt decades ago, in the 60ies, from the computers that existed back then: in a resource-constrained environment, provide a virtual environment circumventing the constraints). At least a 32-bit DOS could have been developed (Microsoft made an alliance with IBM on OS/2 but neglected its DOS). Thus, a number of incompatible DOS-extenders emerged, providing at least 32-bit addressing on 32-bit CPUs. Thus, Windows 1.x-3.x had to support 16-bit, and thus were written mostly with 16-bit environments in mind. There existed a 32-bit extension, called Win32s, but it was hardly used, for, at the time, 32-bit OSes had already been available from Microsoft. The idiocy goes on and on ...

A UNIX-like Windows could have saved the industry trillions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of businesses would not have gone bankrupt due to costs related to Windows problems.

Boring...

[__aaclcg7560]

I'm waiting for Windows kernel support to be added. I prefer blue screens over seg faults. :P

Re:Boring...

[flnca]

Yeah, SFU is notoriously undersupported. Better than the Cygwin junk in any case. Come to think of it, Microsoft wasted a grand chance to integrate some UNIX basics into Windows. Imagine for example, if we were able to run X apps right out of the box. Windows is such a waste!

Re:Boring...

[ace123]

That's why they made GeNToo!

Finally you can get the best of both worlds! The Win32 subsystem is such a mess, the Linux kernel is a mess. Once you have the GNU tools on the NT kernel, you get a very solid OS that even rivals Solaris 10 in many respects.

It's only been compiling for just a bit over 4 years, so I'm hopeful. It's not like it has crashed or anything... no that wouldn't make any sense...

Re:Boring...

[__aaclcg7560]

I'm not sure about GeNToo, but you're killing kittens with Debian. ;)

Re:Boring...

[cstdenis]

Blue screen is a kernel panic.

A seg fault is an illegal operation/general protection fault/access violation/etc.

Re:Boring...

[rbanffy]

I remember hearing someone musing around this. I can do most of that with Cygwin. It makes Windows a barely usable system, as opposed to the toy it is out of the box.

Re:this is great news!

[r00t]

finally you linux fags will have something to chatter on about.

Excuse me? You have that backwards. Linux does not appear to have given consent:

http://www.cryptohax.com/humor%5Ctux.jpg

FreeBSD however...

What about Netcraft?

[gmhowell]

Does this mean Netcraft no longer confirms it?

I believe I speak for everyone when I say ..

[Idimmu Xul]

ZFS, woohoooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!

Re:I believe I speak for everyone when I say ..

[Ilgaz]

If ZFS is not being on Linux for political/license etc. issues, especially on a purist, true GNU Linux like Debian distro, you shouldn't expect it.

I am not really following ZFS development but I suspect it could have something with license. It is not like Linux guys can't code a ZFS driver?

Re:I believe I speak for everyone when I say ..

[BitZtream]

Debian with a FreeBSD kernel isn't a 'purist' GNU or Linux OS in any sense anyway.

Its all about the license, more specifically its about what GPL restricts. GPL incompatibilities with the ZFS license are the problem, which is why other non-virus infected OSes have no problem including it.

You could of course, just use the FUSE module for it on Linux anyway and not worry about the license restrictions.

Lets face it however, if you're a purist, you've already cut yourself out of so much useful software based on retarded principles that it doesn't really matter anymore. GNU purists are just fanboys who lost touch with reality and rationality long ago. Thats what you get when you join a cult, especially Stallman's cult.

Re:ports--

[jps25]

Even getting a decent lamp server fully setup is a chore under freebsd. Hopefully debian/apt can breath more life into it!

I couldn't imagine why...

Re:/usr/bin/pride, /usr/bin/ego, /etc

[norton_I]

Compiler and toolchain, and all the 'standard' UNIX tools: the shell, the text utils like cat, grep, awk, etc.

Basically, back in the 80s, the FSF, reimplemented what was at that time nearly the entirety of what was called UNIX except the kernel (which was what the HURD project was/is). It was to be the GNU OS. While the kernel was in development, the userspace tools were developed and ported to other UNIX systems like sunos as a replacement for the often deficient historical versions supported by the UNIX vendors.

So when Linus came along and wrote a UNIX-like kernel using gcc, he could load all those programs on and have a mostly functioning UNIX environment. This was the reason RMS objected to calling it just Linux, at that time the majority of the code running on the system was GNU. It was probably a legitimate point at the time. And even if there were a different compiler, without a set of userspace tools that people could freely get and use it is unlikely Linux would have been able to take off.

Now, of course, a huge part of the user experience is provided by X11, the desktop environments, and various graphical appliations. GNOME is part of the GNU project but X.org, KDE, and most of the applications are not. So it isn't really true that GNU software is still the majority of the OS. Of course, the kernel is even less important in terms of the user environment, and despite all the other software around it, GNU utilities are what makes it (not) UNIX.

I think you mean 3 kernels

[stonemetal]

Debian also has a hurd distribution.

Re:I think you mean 3 kernels

[Nimey]

Lies. RMS hasn't ever gotten Emacs to boot successfully.

Re:I think you mean 3 kernels

[John Hasler]

Not an official architecture.

So in other words...

[hedwards]

Debian is dead. Netcraft confirms it.

This is new?

[insane_coder]

I must be missing something. I have a Debian FreeBSD Live CD from 2006. Here it was reported that Debian imported the FreeBSD Kernel over 4 years ago. What exactly happened now that is new?

Re:This is new?

[insane_coder]

Okay, summary is definitely wrong, Debian already supports four completely different kernels. See here.

Re:This is new?

[John Hasler]

What is new is that Debian/FreeBSD is now an official architecture.

Re:Now if FreeBSD just had ...

[palegray.net]

I'm talking about Workstation here, not that free crap

I've found the free server product to work extremely well. What's your beef with it?

Yes, but what does it really mean?

[ivoras]

There are at least two things that need consideration here, in a sort-of general aspect:

• Sure, you can replace tools like 'ls' and 'rmdir' with GNU equivalents, and BSDs already use gcc so it's not that hard to get it going, but BSDs are also full of utilities that are tightly integrated with the kernel. Trivial examples: you can't replace GEOM utilities with md* utilities - they simply cover different things (here's a simple example of what GEOM can do). Utilities like "top" and "netstat" operate on completely different data structures. The Linux "free" utility, for example, cannot have an equivalent in FreeBSD with exactly the same output because the interpretation of what is "free" memory is different.
• FreeBSD can execute Linux binaries natively. This means exactly what it says, within reason. Pick up a "ls" binary from any Linux distribution (actually, pick an older one that doesn't use fancy new 2.6 features - 2.6 will only be supported in full in 8.x), copy it and the libraries it needs to a FreeBSD system with Linux ABI enabled and simply run it. You can, in fact, run a completely Linux userland, except for the administrative utilities. With some effort (because nobody made it automated yet) you can run Debian under FreeBSD natively, packages and all. (explanation: it's simply a matter of remapping Linux syscalls to FreeBSD syscalls; for example: Linux's open() to FreeBSD open(), etc. with no visible performance impact - people are running Oracle this way, though completely unsupported of course)

There's little documentation about the Debian project but it doesn't say which route they've chosen, and what about possible issues with it (mostly: admin utilities).

And besides, a very large number of BSD users will agree that its userland is what's most important - the consistency of development and behaviour, the ease of administration. The kernel features are just icing on the cake :)

Hurd too..

[Amazing Quantum Man]

http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/

Once a decade?

[markov_chain]

Whippersnappers. I haven't rebooted my Multics machine since the 60s!

Going the other way...

[Anonymous Coward]

For a number of years now I've been going the other way. I have a Linux kernel but a large portion of my userland is from the BSDs.

For the most part, BSD tools build quite well on Linux (or more precisely, with glibc). I've had to create a small portability library to bring in functions that glibc lacks, but for the most part I've just been able to pull stuff from FreeBSD's libc with little modification.

I have replaced GNU coreutils almost completely with BSD versions (I wrote my own du and df because the BSD versions are too chummy with its kernel, and I've brought over heirloom sort because it doesn't have the size limitations of the BSDs'). I've got BSD gzip, tar, yacc, among others. I even have (Net)BSD's /sbin/init and related tools, and it works great.

I have some local patches to various programs that assume a GNU environment, but for the most part, the BSD tools work as drop-in replacements. What's more, they have man pages that do more than say "see info", which is fantastic.

Some things have to stay GNU for now, but I keep replacing as I can. I hope one day to replace glibc with a BSD-based version, but that's wishful thinking for the time being: while a lot of stuff could directly be used, a lot would have to be written expressly for Linux, and I haven't had the time to deal with that. I'm crossing my fingers about clang, so that I can replace gcc with another compiler some day.

Re:/usr/bin/pride, /usr/bin/ego, /etc

[r00t]

Yeah, we all know the excuses. Stallman even tries to excuse his lack of desire to credit X11 and so on, saying that X11 is part of his GNU system and thus credited by "GNU"!!!

Truth is, nothing irreplacable was provided by the GNU project. At the time when Linus was writing his kernel, the legal cloud hanging over BSD (AT+T lawsuit) only concerned the kernel. The BSD tools were perfectly suitable and ego-free.

Remember that even glibc and gcc were nothing special in 1991. The modern versions were built via the efforts of Linux hackers, including major funding from Red Hat. The FSF did not create what you see today. It is unjust for "them" (Stallman really) to be claiming much credit.

As for "fundamental" stuff like "cp" and "ls", well that's just trivial.

Re:ports--

[DMUTPeregrine]

Setting up Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP under FreeBSD can be hard, but VMs do wonders these days.

Debian had netbsd and hurd kernels for 7&10 ye

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian added:
Hurd kernel port in ? 1999 ? (may have been earlier, wasn't later)
Netbsd kernel port in 2002

And there was an unofficial port of the Open Solaris kernel to Debian a couple years back.

http://www.debian.org/ports/

Re:ports--

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if 4chan use a FreeBSD/Apache/PostgreSQL/PHP stack...

What's the point?

[bonch]

Why not just run FreeBSD with a real BSD userland and ports system? I'm just curious why you would use a BSD kernel but keep a Debian userland when it would probably be more reliable to just use FreeBSD's userland too.

Re:What's the point?

[micheas]

Because if you want to run anything besides sendmail you are stuck with the ports that occasionally have the quality control of "if it compiles ship it", especially if you head of the beaten tracks and try obscure ports like php and samba.

Debian has its short comings, but if you like FreeBSD because it is integrated, you should find that Debian is even more integrated.

FreeBSD tends to have the source readily available and builds without any black magic to hold together a billion dependencies, so it is a more fun system to hack on, and figuring out where a problem is much easier, if you have training in the Computer arts.

In Debian, simply enabling apt-src does not get you a fully populated /src tree, and getting the source to start looking at to see if you can make a patch is a pain.

Just a few thoughts from someone that uses Debian and FreeBSD as my two most common operating systems.

Re:What's the point?

[DrXym]

I'd love to see the rationale myself. Debian do things which really don't make sense from a real-world practical sense but clearly somebody somewhere is motivated enough to do it. Witness Hurd as another example.

Re:What's the point?

[cbart387]

The one advantage I can think of is that Debian has a fairly significant amount of packages available in their repositories. Perhaps it's easier to port over the kernel than to port over all the resources Debian has at its disposal.

That's only a guess though. I'd still like to hear a well-thought out answer to your question. Every other thread seems to have moved in to tangents totally removed from the article (surprise!)...

Another question I have is, as a desktop user, do I even care? I have never tweaked my kernel so is switching "which kernel" my computer uses really going to noticeably affect me when I'm keeping Debian's userland? I realize that there are some that do tinker with the kernel but I would wager that a majority of users don't.

Re:What's the point?

[Raenex]

In Debian, simply enabling apt-src does not get you a fully populated /src tree, and getting the source to start looking at to see if you can make a patch is a pain.

A pain? Really? It's just a few commands. I've built from source before many times.

http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-pkg_basics.en.html#s-sourcepkgs

Re:What's the point?

[CAPSLOCK2000]

Because the GNU utils tend to be more usable than their BSD counterparts.

While the BSD ports system is very nice if you want to compile from source it more or less assumes you will be doing so. There is some support for binary packages, but it has not yet achieved the level of quality and ease of used that Debian has been maintaining for years.

Admittedably this is not a technical issue primarily due to the Debian Free Software Guidelines, but the issue is still valid.

Re:What's the point?

[BitZtream]

cd /usr/ports/mail/postfix && make install clean

When asked if you want it to replace sendmail across the board, you say 'yes'.

Not sure what your problems were but I've never had any. The only 'hard' part to my FBSD mail servers is patching Cyrus IMAP to auto create accounts that can be authenticated. We use ActiveDirectory and so rather than having to add the mailbox to cyrus manually, theres a patch from some greek university that will auto create mailboxes on first login. Thats just a matter of a patch command line though and isn't standard by any means.

PHP and Samba are obscure ports? Really? I only have about 10 FreeBSD boxes between home and work, but they all have PHP and samba installed except one firewall.

cd /usr/ports/lang/php5-extensions && make install clean
cd /usr/ports/samba3 && make install clean
(Go edit smb.conf in /usr/local/etc/ and then run)
net ads join

Now you're all joined up to an ActiveDirectory domain.

I don't think I've ever had it not build unless I was on a -CURRENT machine, in which case all bets are off, bleeding edge is painful.

Of course, if you find ports hard or unstable, you could just use the packages like you would on every other OS and like you would if you were using apt on Debian.

sysinstall -> configure -> packages

Or pkg_add -r if you know the name of the package.

pkg_add -r samba3
pkg_add -r php5
pkg_add -r php5-extensions

Sit back and wait for the dependancies to download.

Of course if the quality of the source releases in ports are questionable to you, then you probably want to use packages instead, which are a little more reliable as long as you aren't on -CURRENT. They are also not always the latest and greatest as someone has to make sure they are going to work right first.

Re:What's the point?

[micheas]

As opposed to cd src/

Yep.

Not that it is overly hard but I don't know how to do the equivalent to apt-get install to make debian a source based distro.

Would be cool if someone can tell me a magic incantation that I am ignorant of.

Re:What's the point?

[Raenex]

Not that it is overly hard but I don't know how to do the equivalent to apt-get install to make debian a source based distro.

Well, if you're asking how to make the whole thing built from source by default I don't know, though if it's possible somebody on the debian-user mailing list should know. However, for individual packages it's just a few commands, and all the dependencies are managed for you.

Though now that I think of it, it should be trivial to write a script that loops over all your installed packages and runs an "apt-get source" on them. But then again, if you only need to look at the source occasionally for individual packages, it seems like a waste of time and space to download everything.

Re:What's the point?

[Brandybuck]

I gotta agree. I can see the point of a Hurd/Debian, but FreeBSD/Debian is almost pointless. It's useful of GNU libc compatibility testing, and for just playing around, but I can't think of any real world use cases for it. Replacing ports or rc.d or BSD utils might be useful, depending on where your biases lie, but swapping out kernels while keeping the userland intact is a heck of a lot of work for very little return.

Re:What's the point?

[petrus4]

Because the GNU utils tend to be more usable than their BSD counterparts.

Can you elaborate?

Re:ports--

[bonch]

Poor package management? Ports is one of the best I've ever used. What problems did you have?

What's the point?

[asemisldkfj]

I realize that a few people have asked variations of this question, but I have yet to read a convincing answer. Why? I understand that there are benefits to both the userland and kernel of FreeBSD as well as Debian, but if you desire certain features of the Debian userland on a FreeBSD system or features of the FreeBSD kernel on a Debian system, why not work with the developers of the relevant project to implement the features? This seems like kind of a roundabout way of reaching whatever goals this is intended on achieving. I'm open to arguments for the value of this project, but I have yet to see a convincing one.

Apple mkLinux Microkernel

[davidwr]

Apple's mkLinux (Wikipedia) was based on the Mach 3.0 microkernel. There was a howto to make it work with the standard monolithic kernel. It doesn't really count as "shipping with 2 kernels" but it did run on top of two kernels. It's been pretty much dead since 2002.

OS/2 from IBM also shipped in both monolithic and microkernel flavors. The ill-fated but technically shipped PowerPC version was microkernel-based, but not in the same installable package as a monolithic kernel based OS. This was in about 1996.

I wouldn't be surprised if back in the day, some experimental OSes shipped with both 32-bit and 16-bit kernels.

Re:Apple mkLinux Microkernel

[flnca]

OS/2 did have native 16-bit support, both for OS/2 and Windows 3.x applications.

Re:Apple mkLinux Microkernel

[flnca]

p.s.: OS/2 also supported DOS applications. On the other hand, Windows NT supported DOS, Windows 3.x, and OS/2 1.x applications in addition to POSIX applications (I don't know if that's still available in Vista, but on XP at least all of that still worked). Windows 95/98/ME were hybrid 16/32 Bit systems that had good support for DOS and Windows 3.1 apps.

First?!

[Zadok_Allan]

This makes Debian the first distribution, and probably the first large OS, to support two completely different kernels at the same time.

Apparently whoever wrote the 'news' isn't aware that Debian already supports the NetBSD and Hurd kernels.

Re:First?!

[John Hasler]

> Apparently whoever wrote the 'news' isn't aware that Debian already supports the NetBSD
> and Hurd kernels.

Not as official architectures.

Re:First?!

[petermgreen]

Depends on your definition of debian, this is the first non-linux port to be accepted into the debian archive.

Lamp servers

[davidwr]

When I switched my company's lamp servers to florescent, uptime went up but most end users are still not used to the differences between that and the old tungsten servers.

Now corporate is telling me to prepare a migration plan to the newfangled led technology. I'm all on board with the energy savings but the help desk is going to have their hands full for a few months.

Well, it's job security.

Re:ports--

[Ian Alexander]

I'm assuming you're referring to ports because of the title. I was actually on the verge of giving up on BSD's for the same reason until I found out that there is a binary package system, too. I setup a LAMP (well, BAMP I guess) in a matter of a few minutes on FreeBSD with minimal trouble after I learned about packages.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/packages-using.html

Debian Solaris?

[Doc Ruby]

Whatever happened to the project to make a Debian distro using the OpenSolaris kernel instead of the Linux kernel?

Re:Debian Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nexenta.org/

Re:Debian Solaris?

[Doc Ruby]

Does it run Solaris apps? Or recompiled Debian/Linux apps? Or only its own apps?

Re:Debian Solaris?

[@madeus]

I remember reading about that distro a while ago too.

Solaris has Linux binary compatibility, but that requires a patch from Sun to be installed, though I am sure you could replicate it's functionality (unhelpfully I can't answer directly as I don't know if they have done that or not).

In theory it could run both Solaris and Linux binaries. In practice I imagine getting vendor software designed for Solaris, including software from Sun, to run on it would be an uphill struggle. Would be interesting to play with though (but I can't see me wanting to use it over Linux or Solaris proper in a production environment).

Re:Debian Solaris?

[John Hasler]

The CDDL happened.

Re:Debian Solaris?

[Doc Ruby]

CDDL is GPL incompatible. So by that do you mean that Sun killed a Solaris/Debian platform that can run both Linux and Solaris apps by putting OpenSolaris under CDDL?

Re:/usr/bin/pride, /usr/bin/ego, /etc

[extrasolar]

I don't understand the "ego" criticism of calling the system GNU/Linux. No one's demanding that anyone call the system "Stalmanux" are they? It's about ethics/ideology, not about ego. The concern is that "Linux" as the name for the system encourages people to adopt the apathy the Linus and a lot of kernel developers share about issues concerning software freedom. If you care about software freedom and you think people should be able to do whatever they want with the software they use that is on *their* own machines, then call it GNU/Linux. If you opt for this pseudopragmatism instead, just call it whatever you want.

Ultimately, the name isn't the most important thing, is it?

postin' it then hoofin' it :-)

[dpiven]

So how long does it take that centaur to login?

Re:Now if FreeBSD just had ...

[Deagol]

To be fair (and it is a gripe of mine -- see previous post), the amd64+nvidia problem is in FreeBSD's hands. The FreeBSD/amd64 kernel lacks a syscall required by nvidia. Same problem with Wine, too (different syscall, I assume). I'm guessing that it's either too difficult to add these syscalls into the kernel or the developers have more important issues to work on.

I agree on the virtualization thing, though. Qemu is ok for some things, but more mature VM software would be very useful for me, and is the only reason that I may switch back to Linux in the foreseeable future.

Servers

[RudeIota]

but that's what, once a month, once a year, once a decade if your server is in good health?

You seem to make the assumption that people keep their computers on 24x7.

I imagine *many* consumers want their computer to turn on instantly during a cold boot. That's obviously unrealistic for now. But even more certainly, *more* people would prefer it.

Now, I know you may not care much -- but if given the chance -- wouldn't you want faster boot times if possible? Why not? So if yes, why not try?

Re:Servers

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

I imagine *many* consumers want their computer to turn on instantly during a cold boot. That's obviously unrealistic for now. But even more certainly, *more* people would prefer it. Now, I know you may not care much -- but if given the chance -- wouldn't you want faster boot times if possible? Why not? So if yes, why not try?

You're missing the point drastically. With my Mac (and I'd assume with any decent Windows laptop, but I haven't tried it), when I want to stop using the computer, I just close the lid, and it goes to sleep. When I want to use it again, I open it up, and it wakes up within a few seconds.

The consumers you're thinking of don't really care about the difference between cold boot and waking up from sleep. They want their computer to be available when they want it, without having to wait for a while. It's OK if sometimes the computer is unavailable for 5 minutes because of updates, as long as they have control over when it happens.

If you want to make things good for consumes, what you want to do is to make sure that sleep/hibernate modes are rock-solid, and minimize the number of situations that require a cold reboot. The latter can be solved with techniques like microkernel design (so more parts of the system can be replaced while it is up), or with kernel hot-patching features. Improving the speed of cold boots comes a very far third behind these.

Yes, but...

[JoeCoder7]

does it run linux?

Re:/usr/bin/pride, /usr/bin/ego, /etc

[r00t]

Excuses, excuses. It's not about ethics/ideology (and, BTW, I'm mostly in the Stallman camp on the freedom issue) but about ego. "GNU" is a name chosen by Stallman.

BTW, since I know you're thinking it, Linus did not name the OS after himself. Some FTP site admin in Finland did that, via the creation of a directory to hold the OS. In typical hacker fashion, Linus had chosen the truly dreadful name Freax for his OS.

Fact is, a group of people clustered around the kernel developers put the system together. Theodore T'so, a kernel developer who doesn't care for the "GNU/Linux" thing, is the person who made the mistake of building the first Linux install disk with GNU odds and ends rather than BSD odds and ends. He certainly couldn't predict that this would result in an aggressive and hostile campaign to rename the OS.

Unfortunately, the name is damn important. You can be sure that Microsoft and Apple put lots of effort into choosing marketable names. Linux is marketable. GNU is not very marketable; in English it is unpronouncable or bad-sounding. (sounding like guh-noo, noo, jee en yoo, etc.) The three-letter acronym looks technical and complicated before you even mention the recursion.

If Stallman's selfish renaming efforts have done anything related to software freedom, the result has been negative. Making the OS sound less friendly and approachable ensures that fewer people will end up running free software.

Does FreeBSD support Xen servers?

[billstewart]

I'm not surprised that somebody's done a FreeBSD client that runs on top of Xen - but can you run a Xen server on a FreeBSD base?

Late April's Fools?

[Darkk]

I use pfSense which is based on FreeBSD and it's damn stable.

Now with Debian wanted to offer folks the choice of which two completely different kernels at boot time is kinda scary to me.

Kinda like offering folks the choice of booting Windows 98 and Vista despite the fact most programs will run just fine. Just certain unknowns will bite people in the ass.
 

In any case...

[BrokenHalo]

In any case, the submission is a bit confusing where it says that Deb "supports two kernels at the same time". Unless I'm having a total brainfart, that doesn't make sense to me: a Linux binary would no more run under a BSD kernel than it would under DOS (and vice versa).

Unless, of course, he really means everything is re-compiled, which does make sense.

Re:In any case...

[x2A]

"a Linux binary would no more run under a BSD kernel than it would under DOS"

Errr... yeah... that's not completely accurate.

Re:In any case...

[@madeus]

FreeBSD supports Linux binary compatibility as a kernel compile time option (and now available as a module I think).

This could mean in theory you would "only" need to have a base package with the FreeBSD kernel and have it load FreeBSD specific kernel modules and that could be a base install from which existing Debian packages could be installed. Although, in practice I can image it would really mean updating other packages as well as the installer, e.g. like those for bootloaders, to ensure they were aware that using a FreeBSD kernel was an option.

As a point of interest, Solaris 10 is also compatible with Linux binaries, if you have the appropriate compatibility package installed. In theory (license permitting) the same thing could be done with Sol 10.

Bit off topic:

Solaris could REALLY do with better package management - Sun's own patches are inconsistent and some of the defaults are terrible (such as being insecure by default) and of course it lacks both the sophistication and convince of apt+dpkg on Debian. Often Sun packages don't even check for pre-requisites properly, I find them very sloppy and haphazard - this is frustrating especially as without some essential packages software may still run, but behave unexpectedly.

I raised this with Sun at an open event in London, while they were launching the Sun Fire x86 range (which are really excellent servers) which Andy Bechtolsheim gave a presentation on. They asked for general open questions and made a polite enquiry regarding package management. They seemed to have no idea their existing solution was so poor (compared to package management on Debian, Red Had and even FreeBSD) and were _very_ dismissive of the polite inquiry. They looked at each other for a moment, a bit confused and responded "Most of our vendors run hundreds or thousands of systems" they sniffed, "and have no trouble managing their packages".

Of course having seem hundreds of Solaris boxes over the years I know most major Sun customers they only /think/ they have no problem keeping their systems patched and up to date. The reality is they slap them behind private networks, are usually not patched after installed and are almost never patched thereafter (despite having a a number of essential bug fixes in their patches). This accounts for not only security holes but also a great deal of bugs.

Re:In any case...

[BrokenHalo]

FreeBSD supports Linux binary compatibility as a kernel compile time option (and now available as a module I think).

Thanks, I hadn't been aware of that. I'm not necessarily sure I see any advantage over running the binaries under Linux (especially given that there must be an overhead), but cool idea anyway.

Re:In any case...

[mhall119]

In theory (license permitting) the same thing could be done with Sol 10.

It already has.

Re:In any case...

[Gord]

The Image Packaging System (IPS) should address most if not all of your concerns about Solaris packaging. It's in OpenSolaris now, I guess it's slated for Solaris 11.

http://opensolaris.org/os/project/pkg/

Re:In any case...

[Rysc]

Nexenta is superficially similar in end result, but it is not part of the Debian project and thus is not at all comparable. It is Solaris plus some Debian stuff, instead of Debian on top of a Solaris kernel (as Debian is on top of FreeBSD now).

Re:In any case...

[0racle]

They are working on it, though I don't know what took them so long.

http://opensolaris.org/os/project/pkg/

Incorect Bragging Right Bring Only Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

"This makes Debian the first distribution, and probably the first large OS, to support two completely different kernels at the same time."

First? Nope: Gentoo Linux has supported Linux on a BSD kernel for a number of years now.

Also, when you say "at the same time," I'm sure you meant that Debian users can chose either kernel during install, not that users can choose which to boot either BSD kernel or Linux kernel each time they boot... please write more clearly.

Re:And by "support" you mean..

[Tokerat]

Oh, I guess you mean that same kind of "support" that is offered to Debian users using the Linux kernel ;)

So, err, Darwin doesn't count? Mach + BSD .. sounds like 2 kernels to me.

--
Watching Idiocracy and posting on Slashdot at the same time is, umm, spooky.

Ironically relevant to your sig, "BSD" in this instance is referring to userland, not kernel. You really can't have 2 kernels at the same time (virtualization aside), unless you code a new, hybrid kernel or something...in which case it would be appropriate to give it a completely new name.

I've seen a lot of these posts...are Slashdotters in general unable to tell the difference between the OS as a whole and the kernel? Scary...

Hibernate

[samael]

Hibernate saves the contents of memory to disk and then _turns off_ the computer.

Zero power usage, speedy restart.

Re:Hibernate

[Haeleth]

Great if you can get it to work. Which is still sometimes non-trivial on Linux, despite much progress in recent years.

Re:Hibernate

[samael]

Aaah, well, if you're going to use an experimental OS :->

Re:ports--

[FooBarWidget]

"The best"? Ports will blow up your system if you try to update a package A that depends on package B version 2.0, while the already installed packages C and D depend on B version 1.0. Ports will happily upgrade B to 2.0 without warning you, thus breaking C and D. Apt never does this. I shouldn't have to manually inspect every dependency to ensure that nothing will break if I update packages!

Sure, *installing* software on FreeBSD is easy. But managing updates with Ports is a total pain and it had made me very wary of updating *anything* at all on my FreeBSD system, which is probably not good for my system's long-term security. Last week my FreeBSD server broke, and this time I ditched it in favor of Debian Linux. Until FreeBSD gets rid of ports I'm never using it again.

"ps -ax"

[r00t]

How about "ps -ax" bitching at you not to type the dash (which every other Unix system requires)

You're lucky that Linux accepts that standards violation at all. Try it on any real UNIX (Solaris, HP-UX, UnixWare, IRIX, etc.), and you won't get what you want.

The proper UNIX syntax to print every process is "ps -e". Woah, that doesn't even work on FreeBSD! Linux accepts it. Clearly, BSD is even less of a UNIX than Linux is.

IRIX and Solaris will simply reject "ps -ax". (the "-x" is not valid)

HP-UX will interpret "-x" as a request to extend the command line. It seems to be a sort of width option, or for showing command args.

UnixWare will interpret "-x" the same as "-y". This is a format modifier commonly used with "-l". It drops the useless FLAGS field and replaces the useless ADDR field with RSS.

AIX and Tru64 will reject your command too, though they are at least nice enough to accept it without the "-". Try "ps ax" and it'll work, but "ps -e" is really the proper way to issue your command.

Linux of course fully supports POSIX and UNIX behavior, unlike FreeBSD. If you leave off the "-" though, you can get BSD behavior too. You can even mix the options. What you're complaining about is a friendly reminder that Linux is making a DWIM-style guess to deal with unknown options that have POSIX/UNIX-style syntax but no POSIX/UNIX meaning.

Choice

[Yfrwlf]

It's what Freedom software is supposed to be all about.

Now the only big thing left is to use a unified package manager to be able to add, remove, and upgrade Linux packages, even the ones outside the distro's repository. Once Linux is free of proprietary distro packaging, and projects are using more standardized APIs so that users can swap out one program in their software "stack" for another program if, say, they wanted to do something like switch to a new desktop notification system, or what have you, it would be cake! Then users would never be forced to install a different OS just because there's a piece of software they want and they don't know anything about compiling or the command line!

Re:/usr/bin/pride, /usr/bin/ego, /etc

[norton_I]

[quote]Truth is, nothing irreplacable was provided by the GNU project. [/quote]

I can't see you you can possibly think that is relevant. Whether there were other options that *could* have been used doesn't change the fact that a circa 1992 "linux" system was largely a GNU system.

I certainly agree that a modern Linux based desktop is not a GNU OS, but I think it was a perfectly reasonable request in the early 90s. I still call it Linux, mostly because the name is shorter, and I am not about to call it GNU/X11/Gnome/Linux. And the reasons I choose to run Linux over (say) FreeBSD are mostly to do with the kernel and the kernel specific system tools, and not with the userland.

Re:/usr/bin/pride, /usr/bin/ego, /etc

[gbjbaanb]

on the other hand, "stall-ma-nux" is probably quite a cool name. Now say it in your best Cartman voice, see what I mean. :)

Re:Now if FreeBSD just had ...

[goarilla]

is vmware workstation still unable to run as a service and load virtual machines at boot time ?

WinDeb

[tomer]

Next mission - Windows kernel package for Debian.

Re:ports--

[synthespian]

And apt-get can potentially unisintall the kernel package - this is documented - for instance, on the academic literature about package management - about which you probably know shit.

Car analogy

[mangu]

as the kernel is a fairly small and minor part of an operating system

Indeed, just like the engine is a fairly small and minor part of a car. In fact, there are vehicles without engines, therefore, by analogy, you can also have an operating system without a kernel, the kernel is totally irrelevant, right?

Geez, why cannot the GNU people get The Hurd working and get over the kernel envy end this stupid just-a-kernel joke, once and for all?

Re:ports--

[FooBarWidget]

Yes I probably know shit. I also know that apt has never uninstalled a kernel on me, so I don't care whether I "know shit". I just care that stuff keeps working, and with apt, it does. With ports, it doesn't.

Re:ports--

[BitZtream]

Steps to install FAMP the easy way:

Get to a shell prompt.
If your BSD is older than 6.0, run /stand/sysinstall

If its newer you can just run sysinstall without the full path as its been moved to somewhere useful finally.

After sysinstall starts:
Select configure
Select packages
Select your download source location. (You'll probably want to use FTP and the default URL)
Select the packages you want.

I know apt is different, but I can't imagine its THAT much simpler to use as I just don't think sysinstall is hard at all, and you seeing as how you have to use sysinstall to get the OS installed, you're at least capable of figuring it out somewhat by the time you get the OS installed.

Of course you could also use ports which is a little more difficult and requires more fingers and type, and if you're on a fast connection is probably alot slower to build from source than it is to just download binaries using sysinstall.

cd /usr/ports/www/apache22 && make install
(Select your apache build options)
cd ../../database/mysql51-server && make install
(Select your apache build options)
cd ../../lang/php5-extensions && make install clean

When the text based gui pops up tell it you want for each of the above packages. If you don't want the mysql server you can skip that part as the php port will build the client libraries on its own if need be. If you want specific versions of the libraries used for various bits, you'll want to compile those specific ports manually first, in which case the rest of the process will use what you already have installed rather than its preferred version where possible.

If you need to find a port, then you can use:

cd /usr/ports && make search key=YOURKEYWORD

I've used whatever GUI tool Ubuntu uses in 8.10 recently, to me initially without any experience with it, I had to stumble a tiny amount as something wasn't right off the start, guess it failed downloading the package list or something initially, but that was due to my ignorance I think, it was the first time I had used a Linux desktop in probably 10 years and obviously its changed slightly since then :) Now it looks almost exactly like my FBSD desktop, except someone picked ugly ass brown for the color scheme. It fits with Ubuntu and its African heritage, but to my American eyes its rather gross.

So, someone who is familiar with both apt and FreeBSD's package manager or ports, are they really that different? I don't have enough recent experience to know.

Here's a screen shot...

[yAm]

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm926456064/tt0069372

Apollo Domain

[Tjp($)pjT]

Apollo Domain hosted BSD, Unix Sys 5 and Unix Sys 7 under the Domain OS-ness ... So a great direction Debian is taking but not a first. And in Apollo's case it was a dynamic choice ... Very cool tech at Apollo, and now HP has buried it deeply (Also had a great UI design tool called Dialog that decoupled UI from implementation and was way ahead of its time... Alas it seems gone forever even though an attempt was made to "open it" and Digital (then Compaq then, what for it ... HP) had a similar decoupled UI design system, all gone it seems)

Re:/usr/bin/pride, /usr/bin/ego, /etc

[Brandybuck]

Ultimately, the name isn't the most important thing, is it?

I see you've never discussed this issue with Richard Stallman. Unfortunately I have. He might not consider it the most important thing, but it's definitely in his top five list.

Re:ports--

[bonch]

"The best"? Ports will blow up your system if you try to update a package A that depends on package B version 2.0, while the already installed packages C and D depend on B version 1.0. Ports will happily upgrade B to 2.0 without warning you, thus breaking C and D. Apt never does this. I shouldn't have to manually inspect every dependency to ensure that nothing will break if I update packages!

Absolutely all of this is completely false.

Re:Now if FreeBSD just had ...

[Haeleth]

Just about everything in version 2. Version 1 was decent, if nothing special. Version 2 simply doesn't work properly; everything's locked away behind a clunky and tedious web interface, and once you get a guest running it's buggy -- it couldn't even scroll windows right in a Windows guest when I tried it.

That's round about when I jumped ship to VirtualBox, which is (a) also free, (b) Free too, and (c) works properly. Of course, it doesn't run on FreeBSD...

So...

[okmijnuhb]

Would that make it "Debian GNU/BSD"?

Re:Now if FreeBSD just had ...

[palegray.net]

I just haven't had the same experience at all. No major problems with a variety of operating systems (although I mostly use Debian virtual machines). You still have the command line interface tools if you want to script the creation and management of virtual machines, too. I guess our mileages have indeed varied.

4 way redundant PSs?

[dirtyhippie]

...4-way redundant power supply...

What on earth is that for? I understand wanting 2, or 3 just to be extra safe, but 4? How do you lose 3 of 4 without noticing?

Re:Debian had netbsd and hurd kernels for 7&10

[petermgreen]

There have been unofficial ports before but afaict this is the first time one has been accepted into the debian archive.

You forgot Novell

[concord]

Novell has supported both netware and linux kernels for a while now. You can decide which one to use during the install.

"a few" :-)

[r00t]

Every single system that fails your expectations is POSIX-compliant. It goes together generally:

A. support "ps -ax", fail "ps -e", not POSIX compliant

B. fail "ps -ax", support "ps -e", POSIX compliant

Strictly speaking, a POSIX system need not support "ps -e" (for every process), but they all do anyway. Likewise, a POSIX system could support "ps -ax", but none actually do.

The bigger trouble is BSD's failure to interpret "ps -uwax" as asking for ps to print processes belonging to a user named "wax". FAIL.

Re:"a few" :-)

[evilviper]

Okay, so list the systems which are "B" Posix compliant. ie. ps ax shows all processes, while ps -ax only shows processes from user "x"

The bigger trouble is BSD's failure to interpret "ps -uwax" as asking for ps to print processes belonging to a user named "wax". FAIL.

OpenBSD ps supports that just fine, in fact.

Re:"a few" :-)

[r00t]

Okay, so list the systems which are "B" Posix compliant. ie. ps ax shows all processes, while ps -ax only shows processes from user "x"

Huh?

It's "ps -aux" (identical to "ps -a -u x") that brings user "x" into the picture. Plain "ps -ax" (identical to "ps -a -x") has a "-x" option that POSIX does not define. POSIX allows "ps -ax" to be a usage error, but requires "ps -aux" to print processes for user "x".

OpenBSD's ps man page even admits to being non-POSIX, oddly right after claiming to be compliant. (WTF?)

Compare yourself:

• POSIX and UNIX
• OpenBSD

Completely incompatible options include: -e -u

Missing options include: -A -d -f -G -g -n

Other problems are incorrect long ("-l") format, lack of support for multiple users with the -U option or multiple tty with the -t option, missing "etime" keyword... and I think I've abused the pitiful thing enough today.

Re:/usr/bin/pride, /usr/bin/ego, /etc

[extrasolar]

Do you honestly believe a word of what you just wrote?

Yes.

And it's even less a war than it is a religious movement.

Re:ports--

[FooBarWidget]

More FreeBSD zealots huh? It's not false. I've seen it happening at least a few times. Once I tried upgrading Subversion, and Ports silently upgraded Berkeley DB for me. This broke a few Apache modules and a few PHP modules. I wasn't aware of the problem until a user emailed me!

thanks

[anime258]

I have found here much useful information. Thanks timothy !!!

Re:FreeBSD userland unusable

[Galactic Dominator]

* the -j/-z options are new in FreeBSE 7. They dont exist in other/older implementations

What is it with you retarded linux fanbois. It would take you http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tar&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.0-RELEASE&format=html

Yeah, that was released over 4 years ago.

* a help options simply listing the commands w/o explanation is useless. you shouldnt have to consult the man pages to see a short description

That personal preference, not a fact. If you want to have pervasive -h availability, don't use FreeBSD. I don't see the upside, but knock yourself out.

* your "syscall bs" is nonsense. It's like "go read the source luke"...

duh...you do understand we're talking about fucking system calls right? Why would want them documented other than in a logical organized, centralized location.

You computer geeks are all freaks!

[rthille]

Eunuchs and Code Swapping and incestuous distros!

http://www.netneurotic.net/mac/unix/timeline.html

It's immoral I tell you!

Thanks for this post - really interesting

[flydpnkrtn]

These gems are why I still read Slashdot :)

Really interesting, in depth post. You sir deserve a virtual beer or other beverage of choice.