Hi all, below from the last quarterly FreeBSD report in regards of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Just stumbled across it, maybe worth sharing. Regards Peter https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2014-07-2014-09.html Debian GNU/kFreeBSD URL: https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD URL: https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ Contact: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Maintainers <debian-bsd at lists.debian.org> Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a software distribution produced by Debian, based on the kernel of FreeBSD (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 in early 2015. In 2003 there were several attempts to bootstrap a minimal Debian system upon FreeBSD 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 FreeBSD, 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. FreeBSD 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 FreeBSD's own ports collection. We use linprocfs for /proc 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 FreeBSD kernel bug, including EN-14:06 / CVE-2014-3880. 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 FreeBSD 10.1. 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. vt(4) 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 scripts. We have supported ZFS for some time, even as a root/boot filesystem (using GRUB 2; Robert Millan added the ZFS support which now FreeBSD 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. debian-installer already allows for pre-seeded, unattended installs and there are PXE-bootable install images available. 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. We already have userland tools to configure the PF firewall. As an experiment, 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. We try to support the use of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD inside a jail on a FreeBSD 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. 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. 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. 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 at any time.