The State Of Gentoo FreeBSD: Gentoo Sans Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The State Of Gentoo FreeBSD: Gentoo Sans Linux

To some surprise, Gentoo FreeBSD -- the port of Gentoo running with the FreeBSD kernel rather than the Linux kernel -- is progressing...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEzMTg

[ryao]

Gentoo FreeBSD is just like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, except that it's built around Gentoo rather than pairing the Debian GNU user-land with the non-Linux kernel.

This is implies that Gentoo FreeBSD uses a GNU userland, which is incorrect. Gentoo FreeBSD uses a BSD userland. The quantity of GNU software present in Gentoo FreeBSD is comparable to the quantity of GNU software in FreeBSD itself.

Gentoo itself is not tied to a particular userland and being sourced based makes it easy to give users a choice of userlands. We currently only offer one option per kernel (unless uclibc on Linux counts as a separate userland), but I would be thrilled to provide users with the ability to use a BSD userland on Linux. That likely will not happen because no one is working on that. The only thing close to that is an effort that I am making to port some FreeBSD components to Linux to improve ZFS support.

[chithanh]

As the article is apparently based on the forum post and the wiki, it might be a good idea to write what Gentoo FreeBSD is directly on top of the wiki page. Currently it only reads

Gentoo/FreeBSD is FreeBSD-based Gentoo system.

And there exists a project for Gentoo Linux using Bionic libc. However it hasn't seen development in some time.

[uid313]

Why not just port Portage to FreeBSD and pretend its Gentoo?

[uid313]

It would be pretty cool to be able to chose Linux or FreeBSD kernel at boot and then boot the same userland with only different kernel.

[ryao]

Why not just port Portage to FreeBSD and pretend its Gentoo?

Gentoo FreeBSD is FreeBSD with the following changes:

1. Portage replaces ports
2. Buildworld is handled by portage
3. Software in ./contrib is replaced with the Gentoo Linux versions
4. The init system is replaced with OpenRC

It would be pretty cool to be able to chose Linux or FreeBSD kernel at boot and then boot the same userland with only different kernel.

You would need to modify the FreeBSD kernel to apply Linux emulation to its userland or develop FreeBSD emulation in Linux, but neither accomplishes a practical goal.

[garegin]

this reminds me of the wine developers spending time on dragonflybsd support instead of actually making wine be able to run better. if open source developers made shoes they would think about different blinking lights instead of making them comfortable.

[dhewg]

this reminds me of the wine developers spending time on dragonflybsd support instead of actually making wine be able to run better. if open source developers made shoes they would think about different blinking lights instead of making them comfortable.

this reminds me of user spending time complaining about the work of others instead of trying to grasp that their priorities do not have to be aligned with upstream projects.

[garegin]

i'm sorry, but do you actually think that gentoo needs more a mutant version of freebsd rather than fixing bugs in gentoo?

[archibald]

i'm sorry, but do you actually think that gentoo needs more a mutant version of freebsd rather than fixing bugs in gentoo?

Do you actually think that anybody has the right to tell these developers what they should do? (particularly as their hobby)