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Debian Elevates KFreeBSD Port to First-Class Status
Reader tail.man points out this press release from Debian which says that the port of the Debian system to the FreeBSD kernel will be given equal footing alongside Debian's several other release ports, starting with the release of Squeeze. Excerpting from this release:
"The kFreeBSD architectures for the AMD64/Intel EM64T and i386 processor architectures are now release architectures. Severe bugs on these architectures will be considered release critical the same way as bugs on other architectures like armel or i386 are. If a particular package does not build or work properly on such an architecture this problem is considered release-critical. Debian's main motivation for the inclusion of the FreeBSD kernel into the official release process is the opportunity to offer to its users a broader choice of kernels and also include a kernel that provides features such as jails, the OpenBSD Packet Filter and support for NDIS drivers in the mainline kernel with full support."
But, does it run Linux?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
First apt based distro with ZFS? Something worthy of a post about...
I know about Nexenta, but FreeBSD has more drivers than OpenSolaris, right?
As a UNIX/Linux veteran, I have to admit that I've almost no experience with FreeBSD. Could someone summarize why one might prefer it over Linux?
It's nigh time that we look at the sheer scrumtrulesence of Debian and realize that it's reign of End All Be All of OS's must be curtailed and possibly even put an end to. No single OS should be this awesome. And we can no longer ignore the fact that it is.
This is a really cool thing, except that I wonder how much this is going to be used? I'm sure there's a group of people who will be interested in this, and it might be a great stepping stone for those that want to move to/from FreeBSD to/from Linux, but a lot of the FreeBSD community is heavily focused on the fact that FreeBSD is developed as a complete OS. The userland and the kernel are developed by the same people and integrated. So while this is exciting, I'm not sure how much interest you're going to get from the FreeBSD community. Similarly, a lot of the Linux people who use Debian don't think of using Debian but think of using Linux, Debian just happens to be the distribution they choose.
Now, what may be interesting that'll come out of this is packages with better FreeBSD compatibility. That is something I look forward to.
Kernel choices is a good thing. Good job fellas.
Very glad to hear progress on the freebsd front!
--exa--
Scrumtrulesence is a perfectly cromulent word.
if you want FreeBSD, use it.. If you want Linux, use it instead.
What real advantage is there in mixing things like this? And no im not trolling, i really don't understand the point here.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
firstly, i use debian only for that it release "stable updates". at work i use slackware on servers. i hate *rpm files ;) and most of server related support software is linked to redhat (shit) and suse (double shit).
some thoughts: :) :P ) or embedded rtos/linux?
1) linux have more hardware support. i've an amd64 processor and nvidia goes only on freebsd on i386 platform. today linux is an "official" platform. not freebsd. **user people** likes hardware compatibility, not license power
2) why i continue to use debian if slackware arrive to 13Â release? and, checking startup speed it's better?
3) why someone tell that zfs is usefull for SANs works, when everybody use hardware-based SANs? like EMC or NEXSAN or others (that are embedded windows (EMC
waiting...
I think I just wet myself with excitement!
Yes. Yes I did.
How long before he tries to shoe "GNU" into the FreeBSD name?
Running the OpenSolaris system on the FreeBSD kernel ?
Is this a stepping stone to Debian moving from Linux to BSD permanently? I'm trying to figure out if the FreeBSD licenses are more compatible with the Debian philosphy, or less.
Wait a minit. HURD is just another Plan 9.
You WANT to do that? BAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Seriously, HURD is pointless. If I want more CPUs, I buy a bigger chip. If I want more cores, I code it for GPGPU and get more cores on more video cards. If I want more drives, I get SASI or some other expensive SAN technology.
HURD doesn't solve anything. Of course, that makes it a great open source project. And some day, somewhere, someone will make something useful out of it.
Open Source Wins! Yaaaaaah!
Whatever.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
...before some vocal peanut-gallery subset of Debian developers decide this is a horrible, undemocratic idea and must be put to a vote of everyone who has ever contributed a toenail to the distribution?
You do non-production evaluation of config changes, don't you?
C'mon, no professional just pokes "apt-get update" into the root shell on a live production server. That's just asking for hilarity, fail, and unemployment.
can you tell me more about the potential applications of this "test machine" idea? i've been asking for a test machine for 7 months and my predecessor for the 8 months before me, but since we've had no failures, who can find the money?
There's a religious tone to your answer. It assumes the question was: "does it run the Linux [kernel]?" But outside the RMS fan club, "Linux" is the name of the OS, not the kernel. So the guy was really asking "does it run the Linux [operating system]?" Hence the "funny" upmods.
It just occurred to me, that if you're going to quibble about the synechdoche usage of "Linux", then GNU/Linux is even worse, because that term implies that that one OS somehow completely incorporates the other. But you couldn't really incorporate the GNU operating system in anything, because the stupid thing still isn't done yet. (After 25 years! [Insert Duke Nukem or Harlan Ellison joke here]) What's included in Linux is not GNU, but the libraries and utilities that were originally meant to be part of GNU. So really, it should be "Unix-like OS with Linux kernel, GNU excerpts, and some other stuff", or UOWLKGEASOS for short.
But your post does answer one important real-world question, one that isn't answered on the KFreeBSD site: what's the darn thing for? I guess the answer is, "So you can run both BSD and Linux (GNU/Linux? UOWLKGEASOS?) binaries on a single system."
Except I still don't see the point. Is there any software for one system that's never been ported to the other?
if you want FreeBSD, use it.. If you want Linux, use it instead.
I don't want either one, I want GNU, but unfortunately, they refuse to create a useful kernel (there's some question as to whether they're even trying, or if they're just too wrapped up in "interesting" research to ever focus on making something useful), so I'm stuck with two options for my kernel, and, while Linux is the path of least resistance for GNU fans, it's also flakey as hell, so a supported GNU/BSD system is a refreshing alternative.
I could just go with BSD, but I hate their freakin' userspace, and, while Ports sounds good on paper, it can be (voice of experience here) a real PITA in a production environment. In my experience, Debian does the best and most reliable packaging of a wide variety of software, and a combination of Debian and GNU on a BSD kernel sounds a hell of a lot like my dream environment.
FreeBSD is nice and all, but can't they elevate Mach or L4? Maybe then some work will get done in that area.
Actually, Plan 9 was useful and implemented somewhere - if memory serves, Los Alamos set up a grid running Plan 9 back in the day. HURD, on the other hand, barely even exists as a cohesive system inside the architects' heads. Last I checked, they're still trying to find a microkernel to throw the thing on.
Three Awesomes for the Red Hat/Fedoras under the sky,
Seven for the Slackware users in their halls of stone,
Nine for Ubuntu rip-offs doomed to die,
One for the Debian on his deb-packaged throne
In the Land of apt-get where the repositories lie.
One Distro to rule them all, One Distro to find them,
One Distro to bring them all and in the kernel bind them
In the Land of apt-get where the repositories lie.
This sounds insane to people who approach this from the usual angle. Linux has a lot more support for all the junk and semi-junk hardware out there, but some of the GNU core Unix userland is of questionable quality. All of us cursed GNU creeping featurism in the commandline utilities and GNU libc problems at some time or another. You would think people want the Linux kernel and the FreeBSD Unix userland. So why go the other way round?
There are very specific needs being addressed by using the FreeBSD kernel inside a Debian.
FreeBSD's ports system for third-party applications only has a devhead, and that has caused an increasing number of problems. FreeBSD has stable branches and releases for kernel, for "core Unix" userland including binutils and gcc/g++, but not for third-party applications. At the time that this was created it was great, because what we wanted at the time was a stable base system to do "server stuff" with, and the ports/applications were just for accessing the things, a light desktop that didn't do much except run xterm and emacs.
Today, I see two main problems with what worked a few years back:
1) those "server style" third-party applications aren't sitting flat on a Unix anymore. They are stacks of dependencies of considerable depths. It's not an apache with mod_cgi and the base perl system anymore.
2) some third-party applications became very aggressive lately and can be unusable in their newest releases. Many people bash GNOME and/or KDE, myself my favorite target is Xorg. The Xorg server has caused the most headaches across all my Linux and FreeBSD machines in the last years.
So, here's the trick. FreeBSD only has one branch in ports, so even if you use an older -STABLE release branch of the FreeBSD core system you still get the newest releases of third-party applications via ports. That's why my *most* stable OS (FreeBSD) had caused me the most headaches lately, because it upgrades me to the newest Xorg *first*, not last like it should.
I don't want to distract too much from the point of this posting by giving reasons why people want the FreeBSD kernel, let's just say there are enough of us. But no matter how much you want the FreeBSD kernel, many see increasing problems with ports/applications for the reasons I gave.
Debian provides stable branches for all applications, and that makes some people who don't generally like Linux still go "PLING!".
In addition to all that, Debian's packaging system, and the way that it is kept working (few package screwups upgrading), the way that it integrated /etc/* file management are simply first class and blow other Linuxes out of the water, too. Debian's packaging is the best out there, I haven't seen anyone challenge that notion in a long time.
So, very suddenly you have a demand for the FreeBSD kernel in a Debian application provision system and here we are.
%%
(BTW, what blows my mind for real is that FreeBSD is now partially sold based on driver availability. Because they kept their NDIS windoze driver integration system alive and maintained when Linux didn't. That is ... something, I have to think about it)
I had to write some CPU/Mem stats code to monitor our program in realtime. On Linux It's simple a nightmere. The standard POSIX calls always returns 0. So I need to dig into top code and stated to decode the /proc files. There is simple no document at all. I have to reverse engineering the code (fortunately it's open source). Finally, I got it working. Though this is not the end of story yet. On later versions of the kernel, the way how kernel reports the proc stats changed...without any notification anywhere in any doc. I fixed this using some heuristics, To make it even worse, the behavior has change again within the stable branch of Linux kernel. WTF!!!!. Different Linux distros on different patch levels show different behaviors and there is no way to tell which one is which one. So I had to put a --if-not-working-try-this-instead-and-wish-best-of-luck config.
For comparison, on Solaris, code written once, works fine for Solaris8, Solaris9, Solaris10 without a single change.
Another experience with BSD. I always felt like XWindow is much more responsive than Linux. On BSD I can open a fresh gnome terminal in under 1 sec. On Linux? No way!
Years ago I can run FreeBSD + Kde/Gnome in vmware fast like on a real machine. At the same time RedHat9 is totally unusable.
If we put more drivers in BSD and make a Ubuntu like distro, I believe it's a much better option than the Linux mess.
(This post is created on a Ubuntu machine. I'm not a Linux hater. I use what works.)
But, does it run Linux?
Yes:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/linuxemu.html
Compared to your puny distro? Yes, they do.
My first thought was... why?
We are a Redhat/CentOS shop, so the pull of BSD kernel is pretty light, but for backups. See, we have a system that does nothing ut backup everything else. Specs are light, 2 Ghz unicore, 2 GB RAM but it has 12 hard disks in there with room for more. Managing all that space gets VERY cumersome with partitions and Ext3.
I'd consider switching to Deb/BSD if it supported ZFS in kernel land and was VERY stable. That way, I'd get userland environment that would pretty familiar (more than BSD) and ZFS.
Good work!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Linux containers give you jail-type functionality and - unlike VServer and OpenVZ - are in the mainline. http://lxc.sourceforge.net/
The OpenVZ people have, I understand, been a strong force in getting the container stuff into mainline.
There was an LSM implementing BSD-style Jails but I'm not sure what happened to it ... http://kerneltrap.org/node/3823
Not to mention Plan 9 features like /proc or UTF-8 encoding that made it out to other operating systems. As for the HURD, I don't think anyone's found any good ideas to rip off.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
"Wait a minit. HURD is just another Plan 9."
I think that's doing a little of a disservice to both of them. Particularly Plan 9, which was both finished and sold as a commercial product - and is still developed actively and deployed. It's also a very nice OS, which to a geek possibly matters more than its commercial success. But HURD as I understood it had quite a nice architecture and was basically the first (to be planned, at least) GPL OS so it's certainly significant even if not successful.
If BSD can go it, so can the HURD. Go HURD go! I know you can achieve first class status!
Any sane admin has their own local apt repository, that they point all production and testing servers at. That repository has both "stable" and "testing" branches, like any apt server. All of the production servers grab off of the "stable", and all of the testing off of "testing".
The trick is, this repository SHOULD NOT be a mirror of the actual debian repository. Rather, the "testing" of your internal server should be a mirror of the "stable" debian tree. Then, weekly or daily or whenever new debian "stable" packages come out, you update your testing boxes, and TEST the packages against your local software. If something breaks, no harm no foul - you wait till the next update.
Once everything is tested OK, you sync those packages over to YOUR "stable" branch, and then that night all of your production servers will automatically get those updates. No fuss, no muss.
...Also, back in the day [FreeBSD] had a better tcp/ip stack [than Linux] and was generally more stable as a server platform...
I have to agree with this assertion. In the first half of the decade, I ran Linux. I was not running a server platform; I was just running Linux for the desktop because I wasn't able to afford a copy of Windows. On dial-up internet, I noticed significant sluggishness. I was using an external serial modem at the time, so I could see that Netscape or lynx would just be sitting there waiting around with no modem lights blinking.
I switched to FreeBSD and the problems disappeared. Everything flowed really nicely.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is very good news imo. The BSD patent wranglings were done and dusted quite a few years ago, while allegations and legal actions against the Linux kernel are ongoing. What a great insurance policy it is to have a project working on what may become a drop-in replacement as it matures. The HURD will probably never appear in a stable usable form but in the next 6 months we'll see a familiar looking GNU/BSD that is accompanied by all the usual Debian tools and facilities. The fact that it's Debian doing this is very significant because Debian has the developer resources, the legal and ethical framework, the friendly corporate relationships, and the huge distributed community which can make it work. All they need is some money ha ha ha. And look at the vast number of Debian derived distros and projects. This will make a FreeBSD kernel easily accessible to them all, at very low investment in time and adaptation. It could attract and accelerate development, community and vendor, to both Debian and to FreeBSD. Cross pollination can produce very attractive results. On the other kind it might be a kind of heresy. Best to kill them all and let god sort it out.
No, we don't need more awesome operating systems, we need alternatives to "awesome". Try here
I would love to be able to use a small Linux base installation with binary updates - for example Debian with APT. But then I want to use something like FreeBSD ports to maintain all the extra software I install. This is why I enjoy using macports. I upgrade the base OS with Apple's tools but all the juicy bits like nginx, postgresql, etc are managed by macports. If Debian had a way of making FreeBSD ports work like that then one could still get pretty decent hardware support and not have to deal with ancient versions of packages. P.S. I'm aware of NetBSD's pkgsrc and Gentoo. Neither of which feel right to me.
In the United States, the name Linux is a trademark registered to Linus Torvalds.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
What, Fedora?
Call it timing? Snow leopard and Windows 7 are fresh on the shelves!! [ubuntu 9.10 is due too]
Hurd seems to run though last I tried it (in virtualbox) I got some strange errors (tar repeatedly claiming that files changed while it was reading them when trying to do a package build)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You have it backwards, surely? First the "work needs to be done", then if the port becomes consistently release quality then perhaps it will get incorporated into the official release mechanism like other first-class architectures.
"GNU appears to be a complete operating system (although not finished)."
GNU appears to be a finished operating system (although not complete).
Isn't it great the F/OSS doesn't suffer from all the political BS you find in proprietary software development.
HURD runs over L4, and there are already testing releases of it that run on virtualizaed hardware. It doesn't have a lot of drivers, so it isn't really usefull yet, but it is quite out of the achitect's heads aready.
Also, it is available on Debian testing, if you want to try the kernel.
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