Dyson project (Debian on illumos kernel)
Hi, all.
I think it's time to announce, that I've been working on a new Debian
port from the last fall.
This is Debian on illumos kernel (formerly OpenSolaris) - http://osdyson.org
It really aims to be *general-purpose* OS, not a server, a destop or
an appliance.
I was motivated because Nexenta Core Platform is dead [1] and because I can :-)
And, in fact, NCP was not following Debian design:
1. It has terrible multiarch: 32- and 64-bit components in a signle package.
2. Huge packages like system-library with all libraries from illlumos, including
libc, PAM, Kerberos, python bindings and many others.
Dyson is a Debian derivative constructed from scratch. I'm doing
carefull packaging
of illumos bits (all nifty things like libc1, libc1-dev, libc-bin, etc
are present ;-).
I'm throwing out all illumos components which exists as separate
projects, keeping
only things which is unique for illumos: ZFS, DTrace, Fault Managment,
devfsadm, RBAC, SMF, etc.
I guess it is quite similar to Debian/kfreebsd. For example,
I have ported Linux PAM, shadow, openSSH. I'm using GNU userland. Of
course, some tools
will need to be patched to support some illumos features.
I'm following Debian testing/unstable. Dyson has multiarch support with
DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH=x86_64-illumos or i386-illumos.
Currently, it is only x86_64-illumos, dpkg arch is "illumos-amd64".
You can browse package at http://apt.osdyson.org/
Thus Dyson is to be Debian as much as possible, it even has package "locales"
and one can issue "dpkg-reconfigure locales" :-)
For now Dyson exists only in my VM. Here is a VirtualBox HDD image:
ftp://osdyson.org/download/vdi/, but I'm not sure if anyone can smoothly upgrade
from APT repo due to conflicts. I'm not going to bother with it while
illumos packaging
is a kind of scientific investigation :-) It has X server, but I
didn't compile any driver yet.
Also there is a bootable ISO: ftp://osdyson.org/download/iso/2012-05-22/
I do not have installer yet, but have some thoughts:
http://git.osdyson.org/?p=live.git
Currently i'm working on packaging illumos from source [2]
I've patched GNU make to support illumos makefiles [3] as well as GNU
ld from binutils
to support LD_ALTEXEC [4] since illumos linker is required to build
illumos sources
and GNU toolchain is the default on Dyson (GCC 4.7, binutils 2.22+)
I've written debhelper addons to ease building illumos [5]
In a long term I'd like to have glibc ported [6].
A side effect of Dyson project is a "socialization" of illumos with
opensource world,
so it will be possible to have Gentoo on illumos kernel. It will
better fit with other
open source projects and development tools (cc, bison, flex, etc).
Just one example:
illumos kernel (yes. kernel, not userspace) has own kerberos implementation
and ships /usr/include/gssapi/gssapi.h. This prevents from installing
other kerberos
libraries. I've moved illumos gssapi.h inot /usr/include/sys/.
In a short term Dyson uses illumos kernel, illumos libc and SMF as init system.
Ok, there are to many thing I'd like to tell, it is easier for me to
answer questions :-)
You are welcome!
[1] http://wiki.illumos.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1147367
[2] http://git.osdyson.org/?p=illumos-packaging.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/source
[3] https://github.com/ip1981/gunmake/commits/sunmake
[4] http://osdyson.org/projects/binutils/repository/entry/patches/300_ld_altexec.patch
[5] http://git.osdyson.org/?p=dh-illumos.git
[6] https://github.com/ip1981/kopensolaris-glibc/commits/master
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