[HN Gopher] Chimera Linux: a Linux distribution based on FreeBSD...
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Chimera Linux: a Linux distribution based on FreeBSD userland and
LLVM
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-07-03 12:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chimera-linux.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (chimera-linux.org)
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I wish there were a Linux with GNU userland but structured and
| configured like FreeBSD and it wasn't a marginal retrograde
| sandbox with weak community and no support from app authors.
| Essentially I want a Manjaro or an Ubuntu but with BSD init and
| config. Because in FreeBSD (as I remember it, it has been a
| while) you just have some plain-text configs in well-established
| places and can easily understand when and what does run and it's
| more classic unixway. SysVinit was not bad but everything depends
| on systemd nowadays which I find a sacrifice fast booting isn't
| worth.
| craftkiller wrote:
| Arch Linux circa 2011 had the text-based configuration aspect
| with an rc.conf file similar to the BSDs[1] but the folder
| structure was still very Linux.
|
| [1]
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Initscripts/rc.co...
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| I wonder if you've run across the Slackware distro? It was my
| distro of choice in the late 90s / early 00's but it's still
| around.
|
| It's basically a linux kernel but a bsd userland & filesystem
| layout. That's not strictly true in practice but close enough.
| Their other guiding ethos was to minimise package maintainer
| patches so you'd get more vanilla software than in other
| distros.
|
| Having said that, i run FreeBSD 13 for a nas / firewall at home
| (only really so i don't lose the muscle memory) but the bsd
| init system feels distinctly utilitarian to me in comparison to
| systemd / launchd (macos) or even smf (solaris - RIP).
|
| As a developer systemd is very attractive, you get so much
| useful functionality for free, socket management, privs,
| capability management - stuff that you usually want to use but
| would rather outsource than write yourself.
| krylon wrote:
| It's been a very, very long time (~17-18 years) since I last
| touched it, but as I recall, Slackware had an init system back
| then that was similar to FreeBSD's.
| dTal wrote:
| I'm getting a lot of mileage out of Void Linux. It's more like
| Arch than Ubuntu, but otherwise it fits your description. It's
| very easy to configure and administrate, mostly by virtue of
| doing nothing "weird" - just a simple init system, a powerful
| package manager, and utterly standard everything else (the Arch
| wiki works well for it).
| flatiron wrote:
| Sounds like arch with extra steps. Why use it and not arch?
| duncaen wrote:
| What extra steps? Arch is missing debug packages, a package
| manager that can detect bad partial updates, different
| architectures etc.
| maweki wrote:
| Funnily enough, the Linux distribution GamerOS, which is
| basically a game-console-experience distribution based on the
| idea of SteamOS (booting directly into the game platform), just
| rebranded to ChimeraOS last week.
|
| I was immediately confused.
| vzaliva wrote:
| So the most viral component of GNU ecosystem is "make". They
| managed to replace everything except it :)
| q66 wrote:
| i do use BSD make for a lot of components, but yes, there are a
| few where GNU make is not easily replaceable :) there are plans
| to change this eventually, but nothing has materialized yet
| craftkiller wrote:
| For what its worth, the BSDs do have their own "make"[1]. Its
| just not compatible with GNU makefiles so for building 3rd
| party software you often need to install GNU's make on the
| BSDs.
|
| [1] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?make(1)
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| A big part of it is likely that many components are _mostly_
| stand-alone - even things like coreutils can be replaced at
| will so long as everyone is using POSIX /portable behaviors -
| but make(1) gets used by every package that you build, so if
| _any_ of your packages are using GNUisms in their Makefile you
| need GNU Make. (Of course, you could declare gmake as a build
| dependency for 3rd party software that you 're packaging, but
| that only allows you to kinda segment the problem out rather
| than solving it)
| ktm5j wrote:
| Oh wow! I often wished that something like this existed, very
| cool!
| opk wrote:
| Yes, me too. I've used void linux quite a bit which does use
| some BSD components like mandoc but is still gcc and GNU
| coreutils. I can understand the logic of using the packaging
| system from Alpine. I rather like pkg on FreeBSD, it feels more
| consistent, predictable and simpler than either deb/apt or
| rpm/dnf.
| q66 wrote:
| i did intend to use pkg at first, however, after some
| experimenting apk turned out to be the better option (there
| are things pkg still doesn't support - such as version
| constraints, getting it to work on musl is a fair amount of
| patching, its shlib scanning is semi-broken on Linux, and its
| repo indexing is insufficient for my purposes)
| littlestymaar wrote:
| As the most upvoted comment in this thread is wondering what
| could be the motivations for that (and I'm also wondering),
| could you explain why you wished it exist?
| rkeene2 wrote:
| This is the converse of Debian/kFreeBSD ! So if you find it
| interesting you might be interested in Debian/kFreeBSD as well.
| muxator wrote:
| Is it still a thing?
| imiric wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for sharing.
|
| The choice of Python for writing the package management tool is
| curious. Besides the fact that writing such a tool from scratch
| is a large undertaking in and of itself. I wish more Linux
| distributions just adopted a transactional tool like Guix instead
| of rolling their own. Doing upgrades safely and being able to
| rollback easily is a huge benefit for end users that it's hard to
| believe more distros haven't adopted it. We shouldn't have to
| reinvent the wheel every time.
| q66 wrote:
| the reason python was used is because of its portability and
| robustness; it can be made to work (without problems) on pretty
| much any platform, plus it's omnipresent and has an extensive
| enough standard library to write things without pulling in tons
| of dependencies
|
| it's also not actually a package management tool per se (that's
| handled by apk-tools) but really just a build system (it
| creates apk repositories) similar to ports, void-packages, etc.
|
| i'm also a Void Linux developer, and the new system is based on
| my experiences with xbps-src (trying to avoid its problems)
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Why is writing a package management tool a large undertaking?
| What specifically makes it difficult or time-consuming?
| gh02t wrote:
| Python isn't that unusual, dnf and yum on Redhat are both
| written (primarily) in Python. Agree with you though, I get the
| appeal of writing your own package manager but...
| alekq wrote:
| Gentoo's Portage also.
| zinekeller wrote:
| Really not unusual. In Debian, while dpkg is in C itself (and
| still be for the foreseeable future), more and more apt tools
| are rewritten in Python.
| Erlangen wrote:
| Guix is gpl licensed, which Chimera doesn't want to include in
| the base system.
| sjansen wrote:
| An explanation of their motivations would be helpful. I'm sure
| it's great for anyone that already knows they want it, but what
| about everyone else?
|
| My experience managing many different flavors of *nix has been
| that the GNU utils are far superior, so I don't understand
| wanting to replace them.
|
| My first guess is this is targeted at embedded use, but that's
| pure conjecture.
| yyyk wrote:
| I guess they want to avoid GPLv3 provisions while still
| distributing a 'full' system with shell and CLI tools.
| Linux+BSD userland gives them a decently compatible GPLv2/BSD
| system.
| q66 wrote:
| the GNU tools have bigger featuresets, but from code quality
| aspect i much prefer the BSD ones
|
| it's not targeted at embedded, but it is an experimental
| project for the time being (the motivation is a split between
| "because i could", "i wanted to provide polished ports of BSD
| software" and "i wanted to experiment with making a better
| package build system")
| genghizkhan wrote:
| GNU tools are GPL-licensed, and there's a certain contingent of
| folks who do not want their userland polluted with GPL-licensed
| tooling.
|
| I'm not saying I like or understand this, but I have seen this
| attitude among a few in the community.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| > there's a certain contingent of folks who do not want their
| userland polluted with GPL-licensed tooling.
|
| Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Google...
| est31 wrote:
| Google is one of the earliest users of Linux. Microsoft,
| Amazon, Facebook all use Linux extensively as well. Only
| Netflix and Apple have a fixation on BSDs, but IIRC even
| Apple uses Linux internally for their servers.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Just because they tolerate Linux's usage of GPL2 does not
| mean they are neutral or positive toward GPL-licensed
| code. You mention Google, Chromium is not GPL-licensed
| nor do they allow GPL code in their tree. Their new
| kernel, Fuschia, is not GPL.
|
| Linux is a great success story of the GPL, its ubiquity
| has forced corporations to tolerate it and reciprocally
| contribute back to the community.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Regarding Google, depends, they have been doing a GPL
| cleanup of Android, with Linux kernel being the last
| piece standing.
|
| But fear not, Fuchsia already did its first deployment
| into production.
| toast0 wrote:
| Netflix seems OS agnostic. As far as I know, they run
| Linux in AWS, and FreeBSD for their CDN.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The irony is that without the GPL, most likely those folks
| would be stuck with the commercial UNIX clones many of us
| used during the UNIX wars.
|
| While I mostly use commercial software, I definitely
| appreciate having had the opportunity to get Walnut Creek CD-
| ROMs with an OS that saved me 1h trip to fight for a vacancy
| on the university computer center.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > _The irony is that without the GPL, most likely those
| folks would be stuck with the commercial UNIX clones many
| of us used during the UNIX wars._
|
| 386BSD (of which FreeBSD is based) is an independent
| lineage to GNU and was released under the BSD licence. Thus
| also independent to GPL. In fact for a period in the early
| to mid 90s, it was BSD which was used as the free "UNIX"
| with Linux seen largely as a hobbyist platform and Hurd
| little more than a pipe dream.
|
| Linux might have since become the dominant POSIX server
| platform but to argue that GPL was the saviour of open
| source is a gross misunderstanding of the history of open
| source (and UNIX).
|
| The reason Linux "won" was ironically because it was seen
| as more of a hacker OS. It was used more by kids because it
| was more fun to hack around with. Those hackers then grew
| up, got proper jobs in IT and continued to use what they
| were already experienced in...Linux.
| e12e wrote:
| > 386BSD (of which FreeBSD is based) is an independent
| lineage to GNU and was released under the BSD licence.
| Thus also independent to GPL.
|
| Is there a non-gnu c compiler? I could only find: https:/
| /github.com/386bsd/386bsd/tree/2.0/usr/src/usr.bin/gc...
|
| People tend to forget that Linux was a small project that
| provided a gpl kernel for the GNU system - not the other
| way around (hence GNU/Linux, Android/Linux, GNU/kFreeBSD
| etc).
| laumars wrote:
| I don't think anyone in this thread would have forgotten
| that fact. The Op themselves mentioned Hurd (what was and
| still is intended to be the GNU kernel) so they clearly
| weren't obvious to your point.
| drewg123 wrote:
| The desire for a non-gpl compiler is part of what drove
| the development of llvm. llvm is the default compiler on
| FreeBSD. Compilers are hard, and it took a while.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Indeed and it was stuck in a legal battle with AT&T,
| while commercial UNIXes and Windows NT, were adopting
| stuff out of it thanks license.
|
| Had Linux not happened, most likely I would still be
| deploying Solaris into production.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That's an absurdly bold claim even by your standards. You
| can't predict how the industry might have evolved without
| Linux -- there's far too many variables. But even if you
| were to try, the fact that FreeBSD, OpenBSD and others
| are still thriving while Solaris is slowly dying off
| should be a massive clue that your statement isn't nearly
| as much of a certainty as your post makes out.
| protomyth wrote:
| Or maybe they actual like the BSD userland better than GNU
| userland typical of most GNU/Linux distributions.
| znpy wrote:
| Everyone thinks they're cool and everything for not using the
| GPL and related licenses, until Amazon (or another big
| player) comes and eats their lunch by offering a cloud-based
| version of your software (like elastic/elasticsearch)
| goodpoint wrote:
| Why the downvotes? This is spot on.
| zinekeller wrote:
| Except that for some, they really meant it when they
| licensed their work permissively.
|
| (Also your point is a bit flawed, only AGPL really saves
| you from the Amazon situation.)
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > (Also your point is a bit flawed, only AGPL really
| saves you from the Amazon situation.)
|
| I wouldn't be so sure, for this kind of tooling it's not
| like the software is exposed behind some API of some
| sort. When Amazon is renting you a virtual machine with
| those installed on top, are they _distributing_ the
| software? It 's not clear cut at all.
| detaro wrote:
| when they rent you a VM with GPL tools on top, they don't
| mind you having the source of the GPL tools.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| The GPL doesn't go far enough. Now corporations like GitHub
| are using ML to launder their usage of GPL licensed code
| without having to conform to the license.
| https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
|
| Any hobbiest who writes free software for the community's
| benefit is doing the same community a disservice when they
| allow private corporations to profit from the community's
| work without recompense or sharing their work back to the
| community. The corporations also get to use the community's
| work to redirect effort away from the community to their
| own product and platform.
| [deleted]
| zxzax wrote:
| >when they allow private corporations to profit from the
| community's work without recompense back to the
| community.
|
| I'm not sure why this is frequently brought up in the
| context of the GPL. The GPL says nothing about that and
| has never held that as a concern at all. Communities who
| were using GPL with that intent have seemingly always
| been mistaken. From the text of the GPL: "the GNU General
| Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to
| share and change all versions of a program." It doesn't
| say anything about disallowing private corporations from
| profiting without recompense. If you want to force
| companies to pay you, you're better off with a closed
| source license.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| The spirit of the GPL is to create and maintain a
| thriving community around free software. Profit or not,
| when private entities are allowed to use free software
| without adhering to the tenets of the GPL, it is
| destructive to the free software community.
| zxzax wrote:
| According to the actual text of the GPL, that is not the
| spirit of it at all. Sorry to disappoint but this is a
| common misconception that I see. The word "community"
| appears zero times in the GPL. The community aspect might
| be a side effect that happens in some cases with it, but
| trying to use a license of some kind of panacea to
| maintain a community doesn't make any sense. That's not
| how communities work. It's the people who maintain your
| community, not the license.
|
| Edit: The lack of enforcement of GPL is a different
| story, but you can trace that directly back to the very
| same community, including the FSF, who seem to have
| decided years ago that enforcing the GPL is not worth it
| anymore for some reason.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Have you read Stallman's essays on the topic? If you're
| interested in this stuff, he goes very in depth on the
| goals of the free software movement:
| https://www.gnu.org/doc/fsfs3-hardcover.pdf The GPL was
| created explicitly to advance those goals.
|
| From Wikipedia's summary of the essays:
| The author proposes Free software licenses (mostly GPL)
| as a solution to social issues created by proprietary
| software and described in essays.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software,_Free_Society
| zxzax wrote:
| I am familiar with the various other things that are
| hosted on the GNU website. I'm referring to the actual
| authoritative legal text that gets copied alongside all
| the source code that you use, not any other essays on the
| subject. That text poses a different story than those
| essays. I'm also not sure why this is being brought up
| now, as the GP post you made acknowledged that the GPL
| was not even accomplishing that goal.
|
| Edit: Since the license itself is vague on what those
| "social issues" actually are aside from sharing and
| changing the program, in my experience projects will tend
| to use it for whatever they feel like. Sometimes this is
| aimed towards community building but often isn't. To me
| the community building aspect mostly happens outside of
| these legal decisions, for example: closed source
| programs can have a community too, sometimes that
| community might even be hosted in the same places such as
| github.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > I am familiar with the various other things that are
| hosted on the GNU website. I'm referring to the actual
| authoritative legal text that gets copied alongside all
| the source code that you use, not any other essays on the
| subject.
|
| you know that in case of actual litigation, judges will
| not only look at the actual text, but also at the intent
| surrounding it, right ?
| goodpoint wrote:
| Almost every person involved in Free Software knew that
| the movement was about building a community and a
| software ecosystem since day 1.
|
| It's absurd to expect the word "community" to appear in
| the text of the GPL: it's a legal document, non a
| manifesto.
| alerighi wrote:
| For no reason at all. The main requisite of the GPL license
| is that if you do some modifications to a GPL licensed
| software you must give back that changes to the community,
| i.e. publish the modified source code (only of the GPL
| licensed parts, not the whole source code of the project). To
| me it seems reasonable enough.
|
| Apple not wanting to include GPL software doesn't make a lot
| of sense to me, since they still release the source code of
| the low level components as the Darwin project. And still
| they include some GPL software.
| lightdot wrote:
| You don't actually need to give the changes back to the
| community, you only need to give the changed code to those
| you distribute the modified software to.
|
| In other words:
|
| - if you don't publish the modified software, you don't
| need to give the changed code to anyone
|
| - if you distribute the modified software to a single
| entity, you only need to give the changed code to that
| single entity (and they absolutely do not need to publish
| it)
|
| - etc.
|
| I know people mostly view this through the eyes of large
| public projects, forks, etc., but there more to it then
| that.
| detaro wrote:
| If you only look at "GPL or not", you are missing the
| detail indeed. Apple doesn't want to include _GPLv3_
| software, and thus stuck with GPLv2 versions.
| yyyk wrote:
| You described GPLv2. GPLv3 has also anti-tivo and patent
| related clauses which I guess Apple is not keen to comply
| with.
| thayne wrote:
| If that was the case, why not advertise it as having no GPL
| licensed userland components? They way it's worded sounds
| more like they have something against the GNU organization.
|
| And the linux kernel itself is licensed as GPLv2, so they
| aren't avoiding the GPL completely.
| modshatereality wrote:
| Let's hope thats it because the only logical alternative I
| can think of is that they want the ability to ship binaries
| with proprietary modifications, or allow others to do the
| same.
| deviledeggs wrote:
| I never understood this. The GPL folks turned out to be
| right. Big tech is rife with forks of open source these days
| that contribute little or nothing back to the community.
| drewg123 wrote:
| But the forks often _DO_ come back. At my employer, we open
| source our work on FreeBSD.
|
| In addition to being full participants in the community,
| contributing our work back gives us a lot of other
| advantages. These include a wider audience for code review
| which improves code quality, much, much, much easier
| integration of fixes and features from upstream, the
| ability to collaborate with people from other employers,
| the ability hire contractors who are familiar with our
| code, etc.
|
| Note that I don't speak for my employer.
| deviledeggs wrote:
| Sometimes. But look at all the forks Amazon has done to
| various databases for instance. None of that work is ever
| coming back. And worse, they've fragmented the ecosystem
| by building incompatible features with the originals.
|
| If those systems were GPL everyone would reap the
| benefits
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| Liking this or not is an immaterial feeling-based opinion. If
| you don't understand software licenses and their impact, then
| you need to read about their limitations on the stakeholders.
| (DDG is your friend.)
|
| GPL3 prevents TiVoization. If you want to make a "TiVo"
| without other people dictating what you can do with your
| effort, GPL3 is a nonstarter. The easiest thing to do is swap
| the userland for something with a better license.
|
| Rich autocrats like RMS promoting snowball's chance
| unreasonable utopianism, an giveaway, noncommercial self-
| righteousness is fine when you don't have to feed a family or
| keep 100 workers feeding theirs too. Such purity is a luxury
| of the privileged and those with nothing else better to do.
| [deleted]
| spijdar wrote:
| As someone who finds this a bit appealing and perhaps
| speaking for others with similar "taste", it's a mixture of
| this, but also the sense that the BSD userland is smaller and
| less bloated than the GNU userland. It's the flipside of what
| another commenter mentioned, GNU tools tend to be more
| feature filled, but at the expense of code size and
| complexity.
|
| Similar to why some people want to use a musl libc userland.
| For some people, it's the licensing, for others it's about
| the design and simplicity of implementation.
| genghizkhan wrote:
| I use the Alpine userland and so totally understand the
| reasoning of having less bloated tooling and the like.
| However, personally I prefer to apply this philosophy to
| stuff I have running in the background. If I'm using
| initscripts, I'd rather they be written using execline (and
| ideally running with s6) rather than bash, if it has to be
| a version of sh then I prefer dash over bash, builtins over
| external tools, nginx over apache, and so on.
|
| But having used busybox utils on a daily basis I truly do
| not understand how people can use them daily and not go
| insane. The GNU utils are so much faster and more feature-
| filled. To me, reducing bloat makes sense for something
| running forever in the background. Interactive stuff ought
| to be as feature-filled as possible, stuff in the
| background as lean it can.
|
| I realise others have different views about this, but I
| think I hew fairly closely to the mainstream thought about
| bloat.
| gwmnxnp_516a wrote:
| > But having used busybox utils on a daily basis I truly
| do not understand how people can use them daily and not
| go insane.
|
| Busybox is meant to be used in embedded Linux systems,
| often found in routers, printers, cameras and etc. In
| those systems every megabyte of flash memory counts and
| every cost counts. Busybox (GPL license) encapsulates the
| whole non graphics userland in a single binary. An non-
| GPL alternative to it is Toybox which is used on Android
| since this tool has BSD license. Alpine distro was also
| designed for embedded systems, but it is now being used
| in containers due to the distro small footprint.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| Based :) Alpine doesn't use dash by default, does it? :(
| s6 is sweet but openrc is good enough for me. I won't use
| sysD on purpose anymore. I'd like to hear more from
| people using alpine on bare metal.
| spijdar wrote:
| > But having used busybox utils on a daily basis I truly
| do not understand how people can use them daily and not
| go insane.
|
| There's a continuum here, and that's what makes this
| project interesting to me. Busybox is _very_ minimal,
| because of its purpose of having "all that you need" in
| the smallest single statically linked executable
| possible.
|
| The BSD userland is different, though. It isn't trying to
| be small for the sake of being small, but simply being
| simple. BSD utilities aren't nearly as spartan (in my
| experience) as, say, busybox, but they remain simple.
|
| I'm not sure if I'd try to run this distribution "in
| anger" on anything, but I'm definitely gonna give it a
| spin, since I _prefer_ the BSD userland, and am "stuck"
| with Linux because of device drivers. That's probably
| just my own bad tastes, though ;)
| tomc1985 wrote:
| From a strictly licensing perspective, why though? As a
| user, what difference does it make unless you plan on
| somehow integrating `cp` et al into your source code?
| Symbiote wrote:
| Using the word "polluted" is a strong signal that you share
| the same attitude.
| jhkiehna wrote:
| Maybe to you. To me it's a strong signal that he
| understands the mindset of that contingent. And not
| necessarily that he agrees.
| justinjlynn wrote:
| Adopting the language is generally seen as a sign of in-
| group self-identification. The use-mention distinction is
| warranted. If skipped, one shouldn't be surprised if one
| is mistaken for espousing the views so stated.
| zepto wrote:
| True, but it doesn't help the person who has is making
| this assumption to have an accurate view of the world.
| They are still _wrong_ even as they smugly blame the
| person they have misunderstood for not communicating less
| ambiguously.
| jhkiehna wrote:
| so what? People generally make all sorts of assumptions.
| They are not necessarily correct through. You pointing it
| out feels like you're trying to bully him into making an
| admission of guilt or lack there-of of wrong-think. I
| prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt.
|
| Whether or not he agrees with the viewpoint he's
| paraphrasing is of no importance to me. I want to
| understand the point of view of people who think that
| way, in their own words. I have no interest in him
| filtering and watering it down to make it more palatable
| to you.
| infogulch wrote:
| GNU software is not only hostile to integration from a _legal_
| perspective (GPL), it is hostile from a _technical_
| perspective. E.g. GCC is (was?) famously _deliberately_
| designed to be _non-_ portable and made impossible to integrate
| into other tools. Maybe there's some valid historical reasons
| for the mistrust of systems that could be closed, but I can
| also see why some might be turned off witnessing the open
| hostility towards integration and collaboration that is GNU's
| defensive response.
|
| GNU/GPL is carrying around emotional baggage of scars that its
| users were afflicted with at the hands of closed systems. Yes,
| maybe this strategy is protecting them from being hurt in the
| same way again in the future. But it's also closing the door on
| potential relationships. Love and trust requires opening
| yourself up to being hurt, yes, but that doesn't necessarily
| mean you should give up on it.
|
| Maybe the swing back towards more openly-licensed software is
| an artifact of people forgetting the harms done in the past, or
| maybe it's an indication that GPL is an overcorrection and it's
| time to evolve again.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Apple is known to use GPLv2 versions of GNU tools to bundle
| with macOS. GNU userland and Linux Kernel are the strongest
| leverages that free software community has so this might be
| significant in that regard.
| 0xC0ncord wrote:
| From what I can tell, Clang+LLVM is where all the innovation is
| happening. Clang in particular has seen many new security
| features for a modern compiler like the implementation of
| SafeStack[1] and Control Flow Integrity[2]. Even just on the
| functional side of things Clang has thinLTO[3], which makes
| building link-time optimized binaries easier on lower-end
| systems. None of these features are currently planned for GCC.
|
| [1] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/SafeStack.html
|
| [2] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ControlFlowIntegrity.html
|
| [3] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ThinLTO.html
| m0llusk wrote:
| BSD have a different construction of user space and development
| tool chains. System libraries are made for sharing and tools
| are based more there than on direct kernel interfaces. To do
| all of this with clang and no gcc may smooth out some various
| complexities.
| q66 wrote:
| actually i had gcc in there at first, and it's roughly the
| same; however, clang does have a number of benefits of its
| own
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| So what part of Chimera is "built with LLVM"? Certainly not the
| Linux kernel itself, that relies too heavily on GCC quirks.
| robmusial wrote:
| This has not been true for some time, maybe 2017? Linux
| Foundation even had an LLVM Linux initiative. Building with
| Clang is supported
|
| https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.8/kbuild/llvm.html
| cesarb wrote:
| > Certainly not the Linux kernel itself, that relies too
| heavily on GCC quirks.
|
| True, but there was a large effort to clone in LLVM nearly all
| the GCC extensions and quirks that the Linux kernel requires,
| so that nowadays the Linux kernel can be mostly compiled also
| with LLVM. See https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4068 and
| its long list of dependencies to get an idea of what had to be
| done.
| rjmalagon wrote:
| Actually, I have a LLVM build kernel in a Debian server, with
| ThinLTO enabled config.
|
| "Linux version 5.13.0+ (x@x) (Debian clang version
| 13.0.0-++20210418105309+a0898f0cecc7-1~exp1, LLD 13.0.0) #6 SMP
| Thu Jul 1 10:22:40 CDT 2021"
| amelius wrote:
| How do you compile C++ on this distribution (without gcc)?
| invokestatic wrote:
| clang/clang++
| mrlonglong wrote:
| You use LLVM to cross compile binaries then use them to boot
| strap the rest of the system.
| hestefisk wrote:
| Apart from Linux' hardware support, is there any other major
| motivation behind this? Otherwise if you want a stable base and
| sane config, why not just install FreeBSD? :) I like the name
| Chimera btw. Underscores the hybrid nature of the project well.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| In fairness, hardware support is a pretty good reason:) But
| also: It's fun, it's interesting, and that's a good enough
| reason for some of us:)
| flatiron wrote:
| Linux buys you lots of stuff besides hardware. Docker comes to
| mind.
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| Poking around a bit, the FreeBSD Userland port seems to mostly be
| from dcantrell, and seems maintained:
|
| https://github.com/dcantrell/bsdutils
| cpach wrote:
| Interesting that he's employed by Red Hat.
| q66 wrote:
| yes, i originally planned on making my own ports, but after
| seeing dcantrell's work, i decided to help out over there
| instead (i did a lot of the recent ports)
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