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VIRTUALISATION Next Debian release with FreeBSD kernel as well
VIRTUALISATION Next Debian release with FreeBSD kernel as well | Next Debian release with FreeBSD kernel as well |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 09 October 2009 | |
  
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The release team announced that the port of the Debian system to the FreeBSD kernel was nbow fit to be handled on an equal fitting with other release ports. Debian project leader Steve McIntyre told iTWire: "We've had people working on porting Debian to other kernels for almost as long as Debian has been around. That work first started off using the GNU/Hurd kernel, but for a variety of reasons that's not been a particularly successful project. "More recently, there have been small groups of people looking instead at using various BSD kernels as a basis for a Debian distro. The GNU/kFreeBSD folks have now got their port to the stage where it's just about ready to ship along with our other architectures in a stable release, and we're hoping to do that in Squeeze." The Debian wiki lists some of the reasons why people may prefer Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to Debian GNU/Linux. Among them are: Cleaner or more standard kernel interfaces: single /dev implementation via devfs, instead of the 3 discordant ways of handling /dev that Linux provides; OSS as the default sound system (i.e. the standard interface supported by almost every Unix-like system around) and OpenBSD Packet Filter (pf). More reasons cited are: * Other nice security features, like jails. * Support for NDIS drivers in the mainline kernel. On Linux, NdisWrapper is unlikely to make it into the mainline kernel. * Possible support for ZFS in the mainline kernel. Due to license and patent issues, ZFS is unlikely to appear on Linux. * kFreeBSD offers an alternative in case Linux is branded illegal by the SCO case or other threats. In legal terms, Linux sources are like a minefield. kFreeBSD is much less vulnerable to such attacks because of its less bazaar-like development model. * kFreeBSD developers often have more interest in merging new features rather than spawning forks all along (the port to Xbox is a very good example. * Some people say that kFreeBSD has better performance and/or stability (especially in disk/filesystem areas). *The FreeBSD kernel might support some hardware which Linux does not support and/or the FreeBSD kernel support might be better (fewer bugs). The wiki also lists a number of reasons why people may prefer using Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to FreeBSD itself: * People may like the Debian package system (or its package set) more than FreeBSD ports (just a matter of preference). * People may like GNU userland more than the BSDish one (again, just a matter of preference). * People who had nohing against GPL or other copylefted free software licenses would appreciate that useful kernel modules like ext2fs driver, the upcoming reiserfs and xfs, or the upcoming ethernet driver for Xbox would be compiled in on the default kernel. * People concerned about running a 100 percent free system would find that the Debian commitment to its Free Software Guidelines guaranteed that Debian GNU/kFreeBSD did not contain any non-free software. Some non-free binary-only drivers contained in the upstream FreeBSD tree, like the ath driver, had been removed. Mcintyre said most of the system would look and feel much the same as the Linux equivalent, but there would be some changes related to the kernel that will show up, "such as different device support (different audio drivers, no udev). The vast majority of the Debian system is designed to be portable, so I wouldn't expect any problems." |
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