Arch Linux With The FreeBSD Kernel Seems To Have Somewhat Stalled

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Arch Linux With The FreeBSD Kernel Seems To Have Somewhat Stalled

From the Phoronix home-page this morning I noticed the most popular article two years ago today was about the state of Arch BSD. As it's been a while since last hearing about Arch BSD (now known as PacBSD), I decided to see what was up with the project...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arch-Pac-BSD-2015

[shawnsterp]

I've always wondered about bsd. is that the difference? They use a different kernel?

[nils_]

I've always wondered about bsd. is that the difference? They use a different kernel?

It's a different kernel and also a different userland/C-library.

[Luke_Wolf]

I've always wondered about bsd. is that the difference? They use a different kernel?

As nils said the userland parts all also different but it's a different kernel that tends to be much better documented and designed (for ex: having a pluggable ABI system, and actually being unit tested upstream, and just compare the man pages) but more primitive than Linux (graphics drivers, hypervisor based virtualization, etc). However they do tend to also have rather interesting unique features such as Capsicum, or NetBSD's RUMP kernels.

[SystemCrasher]

and also different license... which plays poor joke on 'em

[profoundWHALE]

At least this project seems a bit more active than Arch Hurd...

Ouch.

[danangdk]

lack of developer? BSD still strugle in desktop anyway

[Amzo]

Work hasn't stalled there are just numerous issues that had to be addressed.

The ISO is outdated as that was the last ISO to use x86_64 as the architecture. We changed this back to amd64 as it was causing issues with autotools. E.g amd64*-*bsd).
So all new packages are pushed to the amd64 repo which aren't updated on the website. So the new iso hasn't been generated yet as there are still library issues to fix.

Daily reports are posted nightlyat http://users.pacbsd.org/~repo/repo-report/current/.
The reports track library issues, missing packages, file conflicts, etc:

Current report is at:

==> [Testing] [repo-report] finished: [broken:72] [depend-issues:112] [file-conflicts:92] [libstdc++ linked:15] [libiconv linked:40 check: http://users.pacbsd.org/~repo/repo-report/2015-10-25

==> [Version Check] Total of Outdated Packages [95] check: http://users.pacbsd.org/~repo/repo-r...rsionCheck.txt

You may be wondering why it's taking so long to get a solid working base. It's mostly due to the way patching needs doing and libtool. There would be horrible libtool versions which would change on every minor bump and break all dependencies. So we needed a new option to makepkg 'libtoolfix'. Which meant we had to fix out entire repo.

Then we moved from gcc to clang which resulted in more issues, as we moved from libstdc to libc++ and all cpp programs had to be rebuilt. libtool versioning is better, but still causes some abi incompatibilities which are hard to find at times.

The current version is at FreeBSD 11 and we're hoping to have a new iso out once we rebuild the current repositories and fix the integrity of packages.