GNU/kFreeBSD "bits", publicity, status report

[Steven Chamberlain <steven@pyro.eu.org>]

Hi all,

Ed Maste wrote:
> On 30 September 2014 16:35, Steven Chamberlain <steven@pyro.eu.org> wrote:
> > We need to communicate better the state of kfreebsd and advancements
> > since wheezy;  we haven't done a 'bits' email in a long time.  It is
> > probably in much better state than most people realise.
> 
> I'd love see a kFreeBSD submission in the FreeBSD quarterly status
> updates as well!  Much of the same content is probably applicable.
> 
> Links:
> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2014-July/045573.html
> https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/howto.html

I'm going to try to write something for the latter.  Please let me know
soon if you have anything to say for this, or just ideas of things I
should mention, either for this or for a Debian "bits" mail.

Some ideas so far (already more than I can cover in a single article,
but) :

* new since wheezy
  - KMS graphics
  - vt(4)
  - firmware loading (for radeonkms, what else?)
  - suspend/resume seems to work now
  - MATE desktop environment
  - most of Cinnamon's packages (what's missing and why?)
  - Petr rewrote our threads implementation in GNU libc
  - performance improvements due to GEOM (no figures yet)
  - OpenZFS features becoming available (LZ4 etc.)
  - OpenJDK 7 Java runtime
  - IPSEC in our standard kernel image (anyone got it working yet?)
  - Xen PVHVM drivers now in our standard kernel image
  - virtio drivers for KVM (see next point)

* public clouds
  - worked fine on Bytemark's BigV, was able to rent a powerful
    development environment short-term, and do test-rebuilds more
    easily than ever before
  - Amazon AWS? (haven't tried it, but know we can run as Xen domU)

* (delicately!) mention init system, still being a hot topic
  - no udev or systemd here;  I guess that makes us a "traditional"
    Debian flavour, UNIX-like and POSIX-focused
  - we did lose GNOME (I think mainly due to logind, but also libgbm)
  - otherwise, we seem to have all we need;  Robert fixed up consolekit
  - we chose to keep sysvinit as default, but are in a position to
    easily use alternate init systems;  OpenRC looks promising for the
    future (perhaps usable already?);  I guess file-rc still works

* noteworthy bugs found during the course of development
  - EN-14:06 / CVE-2014-3880 (was noticed on debian buildds)
  - ...

* other
  - building more than 90% of the archive
  - only a couple of RC bugs to worry about
  - jails still working?  though still require manual setup for now
  - probably should make images for public clouds, qemu, virtualbox etc.
  - personally, I'm now comfortable using GNU/kFreeBSD as an everyday
    desktop OS, not just on servers
  - could mention some places I've been running it;  one of my wheezy
    kfreebsd-amd64 mail servers has reached 475 days' uptime (on real
    hardware, not a VM)

Regards,
-- 
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org