Summary
This feature proposes that Fedora userspace will be ported to run on top of FreeBSD kernel. This Feature will provide more Freedom to lot of Fedora users and Friends. Our target is to provide state of the art integration of our userspace components with FreeBSD kernel. As a side effect, Fedora will maintain it's First position among other distributions (eg. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, Arch BSD, Gentoo FreeBSD) which are already working on their own FreeBSD kernel ports.
Owner
- Name: Pavel Šimerda
- Name: Martin Holec
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 20
- Last updated: Feb 29, 2013
- Percentage of completion: 1%
Benefit to Fedora
We claim that having FreeBSD as a kernel of the choice will provide more Freedom to lot of Fedora users and Friends and thus a better out-of-the-box user experience.
Free Software development is all about the choice!
Scope
The actual changes needed to implement this feature are very small. Almost all of the necessary userspace packages already exist in the Fedora 18 and Rawhide repos, except FreeBSD kernel. Only some kernel specific changes are needed.
How To Test
No special hardware/data/etc. is needed for testing.
Testing this feature merely requires verifying that userspace components works without any regressions due to porting on top of FreeBSD kernel API.
User Experience
User will have a wide variety of other kernels available to choose from, including Linux and FreeBSD.
Dependencies
Fedora GNU/systemd baseOS components need some minor polishing. Anaconda installer requires newUI rewrite for selecting desired kernel variant. Network Manager may need implementation of new nm-platform-kfreebsd backend.
Contingency Plan
If this feature is not completed or tested in time, it can be postponed on next Fedora release.
Documentation
There may be some documentation required.
Release Notes
The default kernel variant will remain Linux, which is currently very well integrated, but does not provides many of *BSD features (eg. ZFS filesystem). Users may choose any desired kernel variant, including FreeBSD kernel, when installing Fedora.