Ready Kernel Go!

Ok a bit of a citation of one of my most loved songs (L’Arc~en~Ciel – READY STEADY GO!, second opening for Full Metal Alchemist anime) for a good, or better than good, news.

It’s been a week since my last blog entry, mainly because I was a bit occupied with work, real life and Gentoo itself, but also because I wasn’t having news about G/FBSD.
I’m waiting a patch for binutils by SpanKY/Vapier this weekend, so to start messing around and having xorg working on G/FBSD.

In the mean time, FreeBSD project released version 5.4 final, or 5.4-RELEASE to use their own name. I have updated all the ebuilds from 5.4_rc4 to that version, as they needed just a rename. But I haven’t tried upgrading the kernel until today.
I wanted not to try compiling the kernel with release candidates because that could have been unstable, and I risked to have a non-working system because it has no monitor attached to it and if the kernel failed I had to take the old one which is currently in another room.

Today, I wanted to try it out, and I took FreeBSD handbook to look how to compile the kernel and then compiled it with a custom configuration file. It worked at the first try, after fixing a couple of problems with awk/gawk (still incomplete the fix, I know), with libl/libfl mismatch and with -Werror (gentoo’s GCC is a newer version with backports, so it has more warnings). Lucky me:

flame@defiant ~ $ uname -a
FreeBSD defiant 5.4-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE #0: Fri May 13 12:13:33 UTC 2005 flame@defiant:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/DEFIANT i386

What does this mean? This mean that we can install a full system using portage and also compile the kernel after having it installed from the ebuild.
Also, we can apply the security patches from FreeBSD project just bumping the revision and install a new copy of the sources. I still need to find a way to add the symlink useflag support to freebsd-sources, but I’ll find a way sooner or later. Another solution could be to prepare n eclectic module to handle it 🙂

Well now what’s the main problem? I haven’t found how to install base files for boot0 (freebsd’s bootmanager), vapier needs to send me the patch for binutils, and we need to find how and whether to install the documentation which is not handled by portage on my system.

My hopes now are to provide an experimental stage for installing next week. That will require use of a FreeSBIE livecd because we haven’t started on working on a Gentoo/FreeBSD livecd for now.

In the mean time.. we are plenty of ebuilds in overlay to merge in main portage and a lot of ebuilds needs to be fixed for pam support (I’m doing that right now).