Tag: fc4

Non-default lin­ux base ports deprecated

Yes­ter­day I dep­re­cat­ed the non-default Fedo­ra based Lin­ux base ports. This means fc6, f7, f8 and f9 will van­ish soon (I decid­ed for one month of expiry time). This is because all of them are End of Life upstream since a long time (= no secu­ri­ty updates).

The fc4 and f10 ones are still avail­able – even if they are End of Life too – because FreeB­SD 7.x can not use some­thing new­er than the fc4 one, and we have not test­ed yet a more recent Lin­ux distribution.

Prob­a­bly the most easy way to update the Lin­ux base ports to some­thing new­er is to stay with Fedo­ra (we have a lot of ports-infrastructure for it already). Unfor­tu­nate­ly it is not known if some­thing new­er works with­out prob­lems (miss­ing epoll/inotify sup­port could be a road­block here in case it is exten­sive­ly used in a more recent version).

I want to get some time to have a look if a more recent Fedo­ra ver­sion is suit­able for the use as a Lin­ux base in FreeB­SD 8.x+, but I do not have an esti­mate when I can start and how long it may take. In case some­one already test­ed a more recent Fedo­ra ver­sion feel free to share your experience.

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The new default lin­ux base: FC4

Port­m­gr com­mit­ted the switch to the new default lin­ux base port yes­ter­day. After return­ing home from work I com­mit­ted the cor­re­spond­ing UPDATING entry.

Today I marked all unmaintained/old lin­ux base ports as dep­re­cat­ed (some are marked because they are EOL, some are marked because of bitrod). I use a expi­ra­tion time of about 3 months. So while there’s plen­ty of time to update, you should do it now.

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Bikesheds, FC4 and SoC

The last week has seen some bikesheds. One of them was my com­mit of the doxy­gen infra­struc­ture for the ker­nel sub­sys­tems. Some peo­ple don’t like the way doxy­gen requires some markup tags in the com­ments, some peo­ple don’t think such API docs pro­vide addi­tion­al val­ue and some peo­ple fear that 3rd par­ty devel­op­ers may use some func­tions which should­n’t be used. I don’t repeat the counter-arguments of myself and oth­er peo­ple here, but there are peo­ple out there which already make use of the cur­rent unsat­is­fac­to­ry doxy­gen out­put and are hap­py about this infra­struc­ture. Luck­i­ly is was super­seed­ed by anoth­er bikeshed (and gnn@ wants to work on doc­u­ment­ing a sub­sys­tem to show the ben­e­fits to those peo­ple which do not think yet, that this is a good idea). On a relat­ed issue, I’m wait­ing on a repo copy of src/sys/doc to src/tools (it’s one of two repo copies I’m wait­ing for, ncvs@ seems to be bussy ATM). Some doc@ peo­ple think it is more appro­pri­ate there.

The FC4 lin­ux base port and the xorg based lin­ux X11 libs port are sched­uled for test­ing in an exper­i­men­tal ports build run, we may see the switch of the default lin­ux base port in the not so dis­tant future. It seems Boris is work­ing on updates to the rest of the lin­ux­o­la­tor infra­struc­ture in the Ports Col­lec­tion (gtk, …), so we may see a lot of updates there after the switch of the default lin­ux base port.

In the last days I also helped/talked with my SoC stu­dents. Roman is play­ing a lit­tle bit with an amd64 tin­der­box he got access to and as a result he com­mit­ted sup­port for build­ing the lin­ux­o­la­tor on amd64 as a mod­ule to per­force (call for testers: he did send a patch to emulation@, please give it a try if you own an amd64 box). Ryan is cat­a­loging the IOCTL’s and their sta­tus (imple­ment­ed, obso­lete, …) in the FreeB­SD wiki. I already pri­or­ized those he did so far, and gave some sug­ges­tions how to pro­ceed with the impor­tant ones. This way he has­n’t to wait for me or Ariff when he is fin­ished with the cat­a­loging (being a men­tor liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent time zone means you should be ahead of your stu­dent… being ahead even before he is able to asks ques­tions is … a boost for your own ego 😉 ).

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