Dear Petr, I forgot to mention that I am not on the list, so please CC replies to me. I noticed Petr Salinger's reply because I was looking through the mailing list archives. > Please could, you give us some examples of what does not work correctly using FreeBSD ABI and works using Linuxator ABI ? Your wiki suggested that things weren't working as well as they do on Debian Linux, so I was under the impression that they would work better if the abstractions were moved to the Linuxulator. Perhaps I had the wrong impression. > What kind of userland ? Do you have working X-server, attached > printers, cameras, ... I have not tried the X server. I do know that FreeBSD users have used Linux emulation to make Humble Bundle games work, so I assume that X will work, but I do not know the specifics. As for printers and cameras, I don't know. I am running Gentoo Linux in a jail running in a VM. It permits me to try a Gentoo Linux development environment with OS-level virtualization, but but I have not tried using it for anything else. Yours truly, Richard Yao On 07/13/2012 09:44 AM, Richard Yao wrote: > Dear Everyone, > > I understand that Debian GNU/kFreeBSD currently builds software using > the FreeBSD ABI. It might be easier to make some changes to FreeBSD's > linux emulation and Debian Linux's packages so that the FreeBSD kernel > could boot a Linux userland using the same binaries used in Debian > Linux. This would make many things start working and reduce the things > that you need to maintain dramatically. > > There is not much interest in this in either Gentoo or FreeBSD, but I > thought it might be worthwhile to share the idea with you. Right now, I > have Gentoo Linux's userland running in a FreeBSD jail nearly perfectly, > so it is definitely possible. > > The only issues that I have encountered running Gentoo Linux in a jail > are as follows: > > 1. FreeBSD's Linuxulator does not support amd64 > 2. ptrace does not appear to work on the amd64 FreeBSD kernel (breaking > gdb, strace and glibc compilation). > 3. A few binaries do system calls that didn't exist in Linux 2.6.16 > (breaking build systems) > > I assume that #2 would not be a problem if my host system was i386 > instead of amd64. I worked around #3 by making rm, tar and touch > symlinks to busybox. With that said, this should be much easier to > maintain than what Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is now. I also understand that > one of the FreeBSD developers has Debian Linux running in a jail, so > this is definitely possible. > > Some improvements will need to be made to the Linuxulator so that the > userland will be able to manage the kernel. In particular, it would need > hooks to enable the following commands to work: > > sysctl > lsmod > insmod > modprobe > rmmod > reboot > shutdown > zfs > zpool > > In addition, the FreeBSD kernel should have a kernel setting added to > enable these hooks so that the changes could be merged into FreeBSD. It > would be set in the bootloader's equivalent of /etc/loader.conf. > > Beyond that, there would also need to be an abstraction made in Debian's > package manager so that packages for out-of-tree modules will be > replaced with ones that work with the FreeBSD kernel. This might also > require changes to the Linuxulator to accommodate that. > > Once that is implemented, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will be able to improve by > implementing currently unimplemented syscalls in the Linuxulator and by > extending the Linuxulator to support more architectures. > > Yours truly, > Richard Yao >
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature