Debian just added the kernel of FreeBSD to the unstable branch of its GNU/Linux distribution. The package contains pristine 5.3 kernel source together with patchset for conformance to Debian’s requirements. This is a first step towards inclussion of the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port as a candidate for future Debian releases.
Debian adds kernel of FreeBSD
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I once had an idea of various kernels serving the same set of apps (of course the kernels can only come in one at a time) but they seem to have beaten me to it…
is more than just next linux distro!!!
Pls just accept that fact!
Well the news is that it has now officially entered the unstable branch, whereas it was more of side project before. This means that it is for developers usuable to the degree that they can built packages for it, and start optimizing the system. In Debian terms this will most probably mean that a stable release is still a few years away.
BTW it’s depressing to see how many people seem to have a problem with BSD as a whole. For me this is real exciting news. As where the BSD usually come with BSD utils Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will come with the full gnu userland. I grew up with Linux and I found the gnu tools compared to the BSD tools more featureful and well, I’m used to them. Next to that I like the binary package system of Debian. I run a quite old server and building from ports simply takes too long and the binary package management in OpenBSD and FreeBSD does not really have priority there (which is understandabgle).
All in all good going team!!
“You are so stupid it is not funny. Why would you bother posting such a blathering load of crap?
You have really no idea about Linux, licensing, or the GPL, do you? ”
Have you seen any insults in my post ?
You know, those who are aggressive are always those who are wrong.
Actually I think GPL is good for avoiding enterprise to steal code from open source, but it is my opinion and when i see my boss, I can’t tell him to take this because of an obscure licensing that he doesn’t care about, that’s the fact.
Also, I have beginning to learn UNIX with linux, so yes, I think I have ideas about linux and GPL, perhaps more than the majority of linux users who said linux instead of GNU/Linux.
Have a sit and take a Duff 😉
I saw take a copy of FreeBSD and re-release the whole thing as GPL and we all start working on it from there on as GPL software.
Then we have another strong GPL’ed OS too.
I played with the FreeSBIE BSD liveCD when it was issued and loved it, but the affair went no further due to the relative ease of finding Linux apps for my 2nd OS (I’m still primarily a Win32 user due to certain favourite apps)
The thought of using Synaptic on FreeBSD to install applications is a very tempting one.
I guess it’ll be an install-time option though as Apt-get install FreeBSD would require all supporting libraries to be replaced with ones compiled for BSD instead of Linux.. and probably changes in the folder structure as well.
Just tell me which distribution on linux this all computers are running. I am curious.
I know IBM Blue Gene/L is running SUSE on its controlling nodes.
In fact, FreeBSD and NetBSD scale better than linux. BTW, why at the beginning of this bench, when linux was winning, every linux users point to that site
No they don’t. Linux still beats out *BSD on the majority of tests. This does not really test scalability because it is testing one processor on a 256mb machine versus a quad processor or something with more than 5 gigs of ram.
Linux is a test kernel anyway, it is not even a release.
Trolling? People defend linux and they are ok, people defend *BSD and they are trolls ?
“”
Last time I checked, it was Solaris 8, HP-UX and AIX running on super computers, not Linux.
”
From the Top500 supercomputers list
NUMBER 1
IBM’s BlueGene/L Supercomputer — runs Linux
NUMBER 2
SGI’s Columbia Supercomputer — runs Linux
NUMBER 3
Earth Simulator — runs Enhanced NEC Unix
NUMBER 4
IBM’s MareNostrum — runs Linux
NUMBER 5
IBM’s (I believe) Thunder — runs Linux
So, out of the top 5 spots, Linux holds 4…but wait, there’s more. It was recently estimated that Linux holds 300 spots out of the top 500 for Supercomputers. So, if you combine AIX, Solaris and HP-UX, then they almost compare to Linux, but not quite.
See how much more believable you sound when you do a little research instead of saying “last time I checked”.”
The official Top 500 list, available at http://www.top500.org, does not contain operating system statistics. But the scientists who maintain the list privately keep track of what operating systems are running on the computers, says Hans Werner Meuer, a computer science professor at the University of Mannheim, in Germany, who has been publishing the Top 500 list twice a year since 1993.
See how much unbelievable you sound when you state the list of supercomputers is mostly powered by linux, when there isn’t an accurate list of the operating systems?
“It is from a top FreeBSD kernel developer. He is trying to get this 12CPU system to scale as much as possible on a parallel compile benchmark.
Now you probably don’t know this, but parallel compiles are one of the most trivial workloads possible with regard to scalability.
FreeBSD wasn’t quite able to make use of the equivalent of 4 CPUs doing real work on this test. It achieved about 32% scalability, which is pretty horrible.”
No one said FreeBSD is SMP-ready yet. It isn’t, and the more CPUs you add the more catastrophic it becomes.
Linux clearly wins in that field and it would be foolish to deny that.
But as I’ve said in another post, wait some more time until the hard work on the RELENG_5 is done, and you’ll be surprised.
Trolling? People defend linux and they are ok, people defend *BSD and they are trolls ?
No.
People blatantly lie about *BSD and Linux in inflammatory ways and they are trolls.
No one said FreeBSD is SMP-ready yet. It isn’t, and the more CPUs you add the more catastrophic it becomes.
Yes, actually someone did. Duffman said FreeBSD scales better than Linux. Linux *is* SMP-ready. The logical conclusion is that FreeBSD is SMP-ready. But he is a troll.
Linux clearly wins in that field and it would be foolish to deny that.
Yep.
But as I’ve said in another post, wait some more time until the hard work on the RELENG_5 is done, and you’ll be surprised.
Yes I have been waiting.
“Yes, actually someone did. Duffman said FreeBSD scales better than Linux. Linux *is* SMP-ready. The logical conclusion is that FreeBSD is SMP-ready. But he is a troll.”
you suppose that alone.. If you have seen the link that have done, the test was done on one CPU system.
“Yes. It is insulting to the intelligence of anyone who reads it. ”
In fact, I think it is insulting for linux zealots …
“I know IBM Blue Gene/L is running SUSE on its controlling nodes.”
How do you know? (link ?)
what is running on all of the computers outside the controller nodes ?
“I know IBM Blue Gene/L is running SUSE on its controlling nodes.”
How do you know? (link ?)
How old are you? 13? Do you know how to use the internet?
No? OK, I’ll give you some help. Go to http://www.google.com and type this:
“blue gene” suse
Then click “I’m Feeling Lucky”.
what is running on all of the computers outside the controller nodes ?
A custom OS from IBM.
“A custom OS from IBM. ”
OK that’s all.
“What? What link? Both the ones I posted were most definitely run on SMP systems. You are remarkably stupid, even for a BSD troll. ”
The link I post …
I also note that any linux user is not able to speak without insulting the other one…
In fact, you have also assuming that I was a BSD user, but i am not. I run a lots of differents UNIX systems (not FreeBSD as you think).
I think that you must just turn off you computer and have a rest, because you seems to be very angry …
you people are pathetic. Turning and article on debian adding an unstable branch that uses the freebsd kernel in to flamewars on gpl vs bsd, solaris vs linux, *bsd vs linux, ufs vs ext3 vs reiser etc etc..
…bunch of hypocritical losers.
It is funny to see that when someone talk about linux, it seems to hurt you personnally. Are you a part of the linux kernel ?
“>It also shows how mature and portal the GNU userland needs >to be for this to work.
That’s why the initial idea of debian team – use bsd’s libc + kernel with gnu software failed misreably. Some parts of gnu userland turned out to be unportable, due to lack of development culture, and loads of linuxisms and glibcisms in the sources… And anyone who ever tried to compile auto*, configure, etc. oriented programs on platform with non-gnu userland/kernel/compiler/includes/libraries knows that it’s going to be a major PITA next time too… Because one needs “right” awk, “right” cc, “right” ld and “right” everything. Where “right” is NOT standards (I mean posix/sus) compatible, but is GNU. The destruction of a single positive result of unix wars (standards) is in progress, due to gnu/linux crowd with their “mature” and “portal” software.”
How about a few facts.
Actually, the initial effort to port Debian to FreeBSD didn’t fail for technical reasons. I know, I did it. The problem was that personal difficulties forced me off the net. I still believe the move to glibc was a mistake — I had tried it first, and decided against it, before Robert Millan started porting to it. I don’t believe glibc on FreeBSD will ever become as complete and stable as glibc on Linux or the native libc on FreeBSD. There simply aren’t enough people working on it. For a couple years, no-one was.
The GNU programs didn’t have serious portability problems. The major headaches were with certain critical Debian packages that depend on Linux or glibc. util-linux, debianutils, dpkg, sysvinit — packages like that. None of those are GNU, and all of them were doing very system-specific things.
As we all know, the FreeBSD project and the Debian project have different approaches to managing developers. In FreeBSD world, just because you maintain a port, it doesn’t mean you’re the boss. We have all seen where the model of a steering committee of looong time Unix developers plus a comitter status leads to: an up-to-date Unix system both in terms of userland sotware and in terms of kernel and networking technologies.
In Debian, however, if you’ve withstood 1+ year of being tortured with questions, you achieve “developer” status. This means you don’t even have to know what **p means, but you get to vote on the project! You become a mighty Debian developer! It’s a democracy! It means you get to stall a project! It means you get to argue on equal terms with real programmers! You package debs and argue endlessly, and you don’t have to know chicken shit about protocols or any other hardcore Unix stuff. Doesn’t it sound great ?! You get to walk around with cool red-spiral T-shirts, too!
What is great about this project is that we now can have Debian maintainers keep the packages late 2+ years behind schedule! This means all the advantages of and up-to-date stable Unix distro like FreeBSD are gone! Now we can have outdated packages software with a BSD kernel! Great for stability!
Debian has shown us the way to stall an open source project, and I think this is fundamental development in the open source world. No more ports update! 3 year old debs for the people!
You haven’t in mind that the linux running on this super computer has some proprietary patches that you will never get the hand on ?
And what’s the relevance of this hypothesis? I don’t see any.
1) fork linux and use a version that come with GPL 2.0 and proprietary patch
That wouldn’t be legal, at least if they re-release it.
You don’t seem to understand the GPL very well…maybe you should lay off the Duff a little.
I also note that any linux user is not able to speak without insulting the other one…
You shouldn’t made statements such as these that can so easily be proven wrong. I am a Linux user. I speak (well, write, actually) without insulting those I don’t agree with them. If all they do is troll and flamebaite, I will point it out, and if I’m insulted myself I might take a jab in return, but as much as I can I try to keep my posts clean.
These facts considered, your assertion that “any linux user is not able to speak without insulting the other one” can therefore easily proven to be false.
As always in discussions regarding scalability on OSnews, a lot of people conflate algorithmic and parallel scalability.
The frequently referred to fefe benchmark tests algorithmic scalability.
Algorithmic scalability is the easy part. It usually involves code that is localized to one particular subsystem, and the changes made does not have system-wide ramifications. It’s just doing the same old thing more efficiently.
An excellent illustration of this fact is that when the fefe benchmarks was first published, NetBSD didn’t do too well. They rectified that in a matter of weeks.
Parallel scalability is hard and requires a long-term system-wide effort, and some of the time it’s hard to know if you’re going in the right direction.
When the FreeBSD project branched 5.x over four (or five?) years ago, they started working on improving SMP (the SMPng project) and multithreading (the KSE project), and those two projects are the main causes for why a production ready 5.x has been so long in coming. And even today, linuxthreads, a FreeBSD port of the old Linux userland threading library, is still the best alternative in FreeBSD for certain applications.
The Linux camp started working on SMP much earlier than any of the BSDs, and has also had to some major corporations (most notably SGI) putting their effort into it and as a result is way ahead of its open source competitors in that area and is considered a viable alternative to Solaris.
So again, algorithmic scalability is low hanging fruit (esp. when you can look at open source systems that has already done the right thing), and is only really interesting when it’s done poorly. Parallel scalability is hard, and requires constant vigilance to ensure that you’re not moving in the wrong direction, something the Linux folks recently discovered when they found there had been regressions both from 2.4 and within the 2.6 series running a particular benchmark on SMP machines (the regression in question was benchmarked on a four-way Intel Xeon).
I agree with you mostly, but just a couple of small points.
The Linux camp started working on SMP much earlier than any of the BSDs,
Actually FreeBSD devs used to boast about having a working SMP implementation before Linux.
and has also had to some major corporations (most notably SGI)
In Linux 2.5/6, the biggest scalability pieces came from SUSE and RedHat (per-CPU scheduler, per-device block layer, lightweight rmap VM). IBM was another big contender, with a lot of RCU work. I forget exactly who did the per-inode radix tree pagecache. I think Andrew Morton was the man behind per-CPU page lists, per-zone LRU lists (and he would have been probably at Digeo at that time). Not sure who did the other pieces of the NUMA memory allocator work. Probably much of it would have been IBM.
SGI has contributed *relatively* little, apart from smaller fixes to odd things that blow up at 512 CPUs but nobody else has ever seen… although it looks like they are gearing up – their main development target is now the stock 2.6 kernel rather than their own propack.
Parallel scalability is hard, and requires constant vigilance to ensure that you’re not moving in the wrong direction, something the Linux folks recently discovered when they found there had been regressions both from 2.4 and within the 2.6 series running a particular benchmark on SMP machines (the regression in question was benchmarked on a four-way Intel Xeon).
4 way Itanium 2…
This was actually RedHat’s enterprise 2.4 kernel, which looks a lot more like 2.6 (trust me, stock 2.4 could *not* drive hundreds of disks efficiently in SMP).
The regression wasn’t a scalability problem per-se, just that a single tuning parameter for the multiprocessor scheduler had not been set correctly for the Itanium’s huge caches. Fixing this solved the problem.
But you are right that it takes work to keep regressions away.
No, apparently you know nothing about how Copyright works. You cannot relicense code you didn’t write! If you write a derivative work, then you can license it under whatever license you want as long as the original license permits that, but the original code is still licensed under the original license.
About this project, I honestly think is a total waste of time. They only have a couple of guys working on it. When they encounter a problem and the kernel panics nobody is going to help them because their running this abomination. One of FreeBSD’s strengths is that it’s a deterministic system, there are no random combinations of this kernel and that userland revisions. It’s funny how the BSDs remove more and more GNU userland and replace it with BSD code and these Debian guys do the opposite
The point about Windows support is not true. There are free newsgroups that deal with windows issues too. Saying that you can only get support for Windows by calling Microsoft is like saying you can only get support for Linux by calling Red Hat.
“I am a Linux user. I speak (well, write, actually) without insulting those I don’t agree with them.”
You shouldn’t made statements such as these that can so easily be proven wrong. Should I repeat your insults directed at me?
“These facts considered, your assertion that “any linux user is not able to speak without insulting the other one” can therefore easily proven to be false.”
Not that easily. You are an example of a Linux user insulting people like me, who disagrees with you. Should I repeat your insluts directed at me?
Also, I occasionally use Linux, too, so that makes me a Linux user. Try to claim that I insluted you first, and you’ll prove the statement that “any linux user is not able to speak without insulting the other one.”:)
Thanks for your corrections. Reassuring to hear that the supposed scalability regression was easily solved.
You shouldn’t made statements such as these that can so easily be proven wrong. Should I repeat your insults directed at me?
Oh, please. I did claim you were trolling and flaimbaiting a couple of times, but that’s because, well, you were. That wasn’t an insult, it was simply stating the truth. Just like stating that you seem to be a very thin-skinned person to pop up and bring this up again weeks after the fact is not an insult.
Not that easily. You are an example of a Linux user insulting people like me, who disagrees with you. Should I repeat your insluts directed at me?
Yes, please, provide us with a link to the last time I “insulted” you, so we can all put it back in context. But I warn you, I won’t let you twist the words in order to prove your point (that’s not an insult, btw – I suggest you read up on the dictionary definition of the word).
Also, I occasionally use Linux, too, so that makes me a Linux user. Try to claim that I insluted you first, and you’ll prove the statement that “any linux user is not able to speak without insulting the other one.”:)
No I won’t, because “any linux user” means “all linux users”. Even if you did insult me first (which you probably did), that would prove nothing. You can’t make a rule based on such a small sampling, any basic course in Statistics will tell you that.
Also, when duffman wrote “linux user”, he clearly meant “linux enthusiast”, not casual once-in-a-while users. That much can easily be deducted from his posts, unless one is only interested in taking things out of context and playing on words to prove a point. You may technically be a “linux user”, but you’re definitely not a linux advocate, and those were the people targeted by duffman’s criticism.
Meanwhile, I guess I’m a Windows user since I use Windows every work day…
Why would a FreeBSD user want to use the GNU userland? Ugh!