Gentoo/FreeBSD

1.  Project Description

Gentoo/FreeBSD (or Gentoo/FBSD, or G/FBSD) is an effort to create a complete FreeBSD-based Gentoo system, sharing the complete administration facilities of Gentoo with the reliability of the FreeBSD kernel and userland.

An experimental, yet incomplete release have been done, and it's possible to install Gentoo/FreeBSD following the install guide.

This project is still in its infancy. If you are interested in working on it, please send an email to the Gentoo/*BSD team.

2.  Developers

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

3.  Recruitment

We are currently looking for users interested in helping the project with the following jobs:

Arch Testers

Job description

Gentoo/FreeBSD needs more people testing software, hoping that packages stabilization may happen at some point. Looking for a challenge or interested in the features of FreeBSD is welcome.

Requirements

Familiarity with ebuilds, portage, BSD and POSIX standards, no extreme hardware is required any kind of virtual machine will also do. Be bugzilla, mailing list, and irc friendly.

Contact

bsd@gentoo.org

Team Members

Job description

New bugs show up almost on each -random package- update, an understaffed team can quickly become demotivated by just looking at the sheer ammount of upgrades that don't build. Thus the more people hunting new bugs, the merrier.

Requirements

Willingness to cooperate with upstream maintainers so that fixes are permanent and they don't spawn again after each bump. Knowledge of alternate POSIX is very welcome.

Contact

bsd@gentoo.org

Debuggers

Job description

Even if the @system set works pretty decently, there are some areas that require deeper investigation, from the clash of the very up-to-date toolchain that we use in Gentoo with the conservative BSD userland, there are some things that don't work 100%, ie: gdb debugging.

Requirements

Experience debugging C code and toolchain bugs, library linking, frame unwinding, etc. Not afraid of running a gcc testsuite, nor afraid of submitting bug reports upstream.

Contact

bsd@gentoo.org

4.  Resources

Resources offered by the fbsd project are:

• Gentoo/FreeBSD installation guide

5.  Mini FAQ

1. Is Gentoo/FreeBSD just a portage on top of FreeBSD system?
No, Gentoo/FreeBSD aims to provide a complete FreeBSD-based system using Gentoo design principles. This means that it's going to use the Gentoo init system, administration utilities and toolchain support.

2. Which toolchain is being used to build the system?
Gentoo toolchain is being used. This means that GCC can be chosen between the currently available versions in portage (4.2, 4.3 and 4.4), and the same goes with binutils, for which the needed patch form FreeBSD has already been forwardported (and applied upstream for 2.17 series, currently running well on 2.20).

3. Is Stack Smashing Protection supported?
Yes, as we use Gentoo toolchain we also have GCC patched with Propolice, and since the introduction of FreeBSD-8.0 the base system is patched to support SSP by default. The linkage of local SSP symbols is done using a linker script thanks to the newer binutils available, while on vanilla FreeBSD it's being done directly on the gcc-spec, this method also avoids text relocations making SSP support pretty clean.

6.  Building a Gentoo/FreeBSD crosscompiler

Introduction

Complementing the DistCC Cross-compiling Guide, this document will explain how to build a Gentoo/FreeBSD crosscompiler, as for now it's not yet entirely automated.

The instruction here given works for building crosscompilers to Gentoo/FreeBSD, as they use the ebuilds currently in portage. They might not work entirely for generic vanilla FreeBSD as there are a few things that change, but you should be okay.

Please if you find a problem with these when building a generic FreeBSD cross compiler don't open a bug report unless you also have a patch, as there're not enough people working on Gentoo/FreeBSD to support vanilla FreeBSD building.

Prerequisites and crossdev

Before going to use crossdev you need to install some prerequisites that are needed to complete the building of a stage4 compiler (C++ compiler). These are needed because crossdev does not merge them before the rest.

The first package you need is virtual/pmake, or directly sys-devel/pmake, that provides a BSD-compatible make command, needed to build headers and the base library for Gentoo/FreeBSD.

The second package is a complement to the above pmake. Although it ships with some files .mk (that contains BSD makefile templates used to build applications using BSD style), they are too barebone to actually build FreeBSD software, so you need to install the file set from FreeBSD. The ebuild is sys-freebsd/freebsd-mk-defs and it's crosscompile aware: when building on a non-FreeBSD system it installs in /usr/share/mk/freebsd and uses GNU syntaxes.

The third package is sys-apps/mtree, that provides the BSD mtree command, needed to build Gentoo/FreeBSD headers.

Then you just need to use sys-devel/crossdev to build the crosscompiler you want. Please note that the version specified in CHOST has to be the same as the one used for freebsd-lib:

# crossdev -s4 --gcc 4.4.3 --libc '8.0*' --target i686-gentoo-freebsd8.0 --with-headers

The version of libc has to be accorded ot the version of FreeBSD you want to build for, while the --with-headers option to crossdev forces it to build the headers before gcc itself.