Adam Wilson wrote: > Is GNU/kFreeBSD 8 stable enough to be a usable system? It depends on your use case, and how comfortably you can deal with any issues or limitations you encounter. It is my regular OS for desktop, laptop, half a dozen servers (some in business production use) and half a dozen embedded systems. Virtualisation options are limited: GNU/kFreeBSD runs fine as a Xen/KVM guest, but as a host it can only use Qemu without KVM, which is very slow. (No VirtualBox, Xen dom0 or bhyve yet). For desktop: make sure your Linux files are available to you in GNU/kFreeBSD, so that you don't have to reboot back and forth. (I boot my old Linux desktop in Qemu so I can SSH in and retrieve stuff). For ZFS: make sure you have plenty of RAM (4 GiB+) and at least some swap (512 MiB). Don't bother with the de-duplication feature, it seems to eat too much RAM to be worth it. For 3D acceleration: AMD Radeon cards pre-GCN perform the best of anything I've tried, but need the firmware-linux-nonfree package for microcode. The free open-source Intel driver is good but the hardware seems not as fast. The situation is not so good with Nvidia, we have the old "nv" driver for older cards but not "nouveau". For games: WINE kinda works, free open-source games like FlightGear, OpenArena, OpenTTD and OpenRA work great. Add your regular user to the 'video' group so it can use /dev/dri/card0 for 3D acceleration. For servers: NICs and RAID cards often need non-free firmware. Swapping them for free-software compatible ones is often worth doing. Otherwise you may only be able to run GNU/kFreeBSD as a virtualised guest on top of Linux+non-free drivers. Regards, -- Steven Chamberlain steven@pyro.eu.org
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