On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 05:16:42PM -0500, Nathan Hawkins wrote: > On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 01:57:15PM -0700, Joel Baker wrote: > > On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 12:44:07PM -0500, Nathan Hawkins wrote: > > > On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 02:58:42PM -0700, Joel Baker wrote: > > > > I really need to sit down and write a proposal / patches for NetBSD to > > > > support the 'vendor' sysctl tree, that can be checked usefully. Since that > > > > would be the canonical way of testing this (a 'debian' vendor could have a > > > > sub-field indicating which sort of port it was). > > > > > > There is one possible problem with that. It occurred to that it is quite > > > possible now to run regular freebsd in a jail or chroot on a debian > > > freebsd box, and vice versa. I assume the same is true for the netbsd > > > port. If we use sysctl or uname to make the distinction, that jail or > > > chroot usage will be affected. > > > > This is, in fact, an issue with my chroot environment which I have to > > spend some amount of effort to work around. > > I think it's probably a good idea to mark the kernel, like you're > describing. I suspect NetBSD might be more than happy with that idea. > I'm just concerned about actually using that in userspace for things > like config.guess. I think that might be a mistake. > > We could always have config.guess test for the existance of > /etc/debian_version, or other files from required packages. Something > like that should reliably work in a jail or chroot. IIRC, config.guess actually does look for /etc/debian_version, entirely because trying to parse it out of uname -v is such a royal PITA, and the 'vendor' sysctl tree is, right now, fundamentally broken. > > The nicer solution, IMO, would be user-mode-<foo>BSD, akin to > > user-mode-linux. Especially when combined with bind mounts, this has the > > potential to be very powerful, indeed. > > Hmm. Maybe someone out there would like to make a NetBSD port like UML. > That'd be very cool, especially if it ran on Linux and FreeBSD as well. As far as I understood it, part of the thing that makes UML as workable as it is is that it's kept within the same kernel (ie, UML runs under a real Linux kernel - or another UML, but eventually, at the top of the chain, is a real Linux kernel) > I'd still rather keep the ability to work in jails and chroots. The > jails are probably more useful on freebsd, but chroots make it a lot > easier for people to try this stuff out. As noted above, I believe that (since this was more or less a requirement to begin with) it's still possible to do. Things like the sysctl vendor stuff are more of a nicety. > > Unfortunately, I'm still not entirely clear on what all would need to be > > done, to accomplish this properly. > > I don't know. Sounds like a lot of work. Quiet possibly. You'll note I haven't done it yet. :) -- Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`. Debian GNU/NetBSD(i386) porter : :' : `. `' `-
Attachment:
pgp9pOp5VWWTK.pgp
Description: PGP signature