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Warren Block 2014-10-10 23:45:01 +00:00
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</task>
</help>
</project>
<project cat='proj'>
<title>Debian GNU/kFreeBSD</title>
<contact>
<person>
<name>Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Maintainers</name>
<email>debian-bsd@lists.debian.org</email>
</person>
</contact>
<links>
<url href="https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD">Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on the Debian Wiki</url>
<url href="https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/" />
</links>
<body>
<p>Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a software distribution produced by
Debian, based on the kernel of &os; (instead of Linux) and GNU
libc. Around 90% of Debian's software archive has now been
ported to it, for amd64 and i386 architectures. It was first
released with Debian "squeeze" as a development preview in
2011, featured again in the "wheezy" release, and hopes to be
part of the official Debian "jessie" release early 2015.</p>
<p>In 2003 there were several attempts to bootstrap a minimal
Debian system upon &os; or NetBSD kernels, some also trying to
use the native BSD libc. The most successful and
longest-lived of these was a "GNU/FreeBSD" chroot bootstrapped
by Robert Millan with the GNU libc that most of Debian's core
packages were designed to work with. The "k" was later added
to the name to reflect that it takes just the kernel from
&os;, with most everything else from the Debian archive. We
do also package some FreeBSD utilities as needed to boot it
and take advantage of certain features.</p>
<p>&os; support within GNU libc is now mostly maintained by Petr
Salinger, who recently converted it from an older threading
implementation based on LinuxThreads to NPTL which is much
more compatible with the software we run. We have the GNU
compiler toolchain as well as Clang 3.4; Perl, Python and
Ruby; and OpenJDK 7, based the on work done in &os;'s own
ports collection. We use linprocfs for <tt>/proc</tt> because
much of Debian GNU software expects this. The Linuxulator
is not needed at all, but could make for interesting future
uses. Porting work mostly focuses now on individual packages'
build systems, on preprocessor #ifdefs that do not clearly
distinguish between kernel and libc, or fixing testsuites'
presumptions of Linux-specific behaviour. In the course of
this, we even found the odd &os; kernel bug, including
EN-14:06 / CVE-2014-3880.</p>
<p>GNU/kFreeBSD has already seen production use, mostly on
webservers, email servers and file servers; one such machine
has 475 days' uptime receiving around 10,000 emails per day.
It has become increasingly practical for desktop/laptop uses
thanks largely to new features coming in from &os; 10.1.</p>
<p>KMS graphics mean that 3D gaming and high-definition video
playback perform brilliantly. We have great support for Intel
graphics chipsets, but only an older nvidia Xorg driver. For
radeonkms, Robert Millan was able to add firmware-loading
support so that non-free binary blobs can be packaged
separately, outside of Debian's main archive. Proprietary
drivers are not useful to us as they would need to be rebuilt
from source to port them.</p>
<p><tt>vt(4)</tt> was necessary for KMS to not break VT
switching. But it has also improved the console's handling of
non-ASCII character sets and we do look forward to having
console fonts for non-Latin script.</p>
<p>We have supported ZFS for some time, even as a root/boot
filesystem (using GRUB 2; Robert Millan added the ZFS support
which now &os; itself is able to benefit from). Enhancements
coming from OpenZFS, especially LZ4 compression, in
combination with better memory management and GEOM
improvements, mean that "jessie" should see a noticeable
performance boost.</p>
<p>debian-installer already allows for pre-seeded, unattended
installs and there are PXE-bootable install images
available.</p>
<p>virtio drivers are new to the "jessie" release, enabling
support for some public clouds. We are now compiling Xen domU
and PVHVM support into our standard kernel builds.</p>
<p>We already have userland tools to configure the PF firewall.
As an experimenting, we are compiling in IPSEC support by
default for the upcoming release, and would like to see it put
to good use against present-day privacy and security
threats.</p>
<p>We try to support uses of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD inside a jail
on a &os; host system, and hopefully vice-versa. Some of the
jail utilities are not yet packaged, but we have documentation
on the Debian Wiki on how to set up jails on "wheezy", which
are fully functional.</p>
<p>The init system we currently use is a parallel System V-style
init, although Debian GNU/Linux will be switching away from
that to systemd. For the next release we may switch to
OpenRC, which is mostly ported already.</p>
<p>Not having systemd or udev, means that we will be unable to
support GNOME 3.14 in the upcoming release. We have very good
support for XFCE, also have KDE, LXDE and the
recently-packaged MATE desktop environment. The Debian
software archive provides many alternative window managers for
Xorg such as IceWM, dozens of terminal emulators, and so
on.</p>
<p>As we approach the freeze of the Debian "jessie" release,
we would love for anyone to test GNU/kFreeBSD, try to use it
for whatever would be useful to you, and let us know what
issues you run into. Ask for help on our project mailing list
or IRC channel, and let us know of any bugs you find. We
still have time to fix problems before release, and we would
be happy to improve our documentation any time.</p>
</body>
</project>
</report>