I've tried to translate Norimitsu Sugimoto's original slides in Japanese, from the 133rd Tokyo-area Debian study session. I've added some annotations of my own [in square brackets].
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Setup Guide, 2015 edition
Norimitsu Sugimoto <dictoss@live.jp>
Agenda
- Self-introduction.
Debian Ports & Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
- Installation of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
- Debian GNU/kFreeBSD specific Debian packages.
- Dual-boot configuration of Windows and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
- Setting up the hardware and software.
- Conclusion.
- References.
Self-introduction
- Norimitsu Sugimoto (杉本 典充).
- Twitter: @dictoss
- Have used Debian for more than 10 years, FreeBSD for more than 5 years.
- [Have become interested in?] Debian GNU/kFreeBSD? [が気になっておりウォッチ中]
- Working as a software developer.
Debian Ports & Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
- Debian Ports:
- Projects porting Debian to a variety of CPU architectures and kernels.
- There are some official release architectures; some are unofficial.
- Debian GNU/kFreeBSD:
- Is a flavour of Debian based on the FreeBSD kernel, rather than the Linux kernel.
- Architecture names in Debian are kfreebsd-i386, kfreebsd-amd64.
- 2011, released as a "technology preview" with Debian 6 (squeeze).
- 2015, it became separated from official Debian 8 release (jessie).
Installation: Creating and booting install media
- Download a mini.iso of daily-images.
- Choose kfreebsd-amd64 if you want to use the ZFS.
Copy to a USB memory stick with dd
- Boot from USB memory stick into the installer.
- Installer limitations:
- [Native] UEFI boot is not supported.
- Disc format is only compatible with MBR (GPT is not allowed). [Actually - GPT should work, please file a bug if it does not :)]
- I ran the installer with LANG=C because it cannot be displayed in Japanese. [Actually - should be supported, only for kfreebsd-amd64, using the GTK version of mini.iso in graphical mode]
Installation: Partition configuration and file system
- Notes for partition configuration:
- Root partition must be a primary partition. [That is, ada0p1-ada0p4, not an MSDOS 'logical' partition like ada0p5+]
- Especially when dual-booting with Windows, be aware of the number of remaining primary partitions. [4 maximum]
- ZFS - a good choice on kfreebsd-amd64, if enough RAM available [4GiB+ recommended].
- UFS - preferred for kfreebsd-i386, or if available RAM is less.
- When you select UFS, the default is synchronous write mode, which may seem very slow. [If you have more than one partition, then only the root (/) will be synchronous - other partitions will have softdeps enabled and be much faster].
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD specific packages
- kfreebsd-image-* [the FreeBSD kernel]
- zfsutils
- [ufsutils]
- freebsd-utils
- freebsd-smbfs
- freebsd-ppp
- pf
- [devd]
- [fuse4bsd]
- [cuse4bsd]
Dual-booting Windows & Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
- kfreebsd uses grub2 as bootloader
- Manually adding a boot menu entry for Windows: [with my corrections, I think]
# vi /etc/grub.d/40_custom.kfreebsd
menuentry "Windows (loader)" {
insmod part_msdos
set root='(hd0,msdos2)'
chainloader +1
}
# update-grub2
Configuration: Wired LAN
- Interface names depend on the NIC model:
- em0 [= Intel chipset]
- re0 [= Realtek chipset
- [instead of a generic eth0...eth1 name for everything]
Configuration is in the usual Debian /etc/network/interfaces file:
allow-hotplug is not available, for Linux udev functionality [Actually - kfreebsd should support this using devd instead - or file a bug :)]
auto em0 and such are inconvenient because [??? - などとしておくと外出先でも DHCP でアドレスを取得しにいくので不便]
ifup em0=network-name is available [what is that?]
Wireless LAN
Add non-free to /etc/apt/sources.list if needed for firmware, then:
# apt-get install wpa_supplicant firmware-iwlwifi
- There will be two interfaces:
- iwn0 (in case of Intel wireless chipset) is the physical interface.
- wlan0 is a logical interface created by:
# ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev iwn0 $ wpa_passphrase ssid passphrase > wpa_example.conf # wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c ./wpa_example.conf # dhclient -v -1 wlan0
- Some hints if it fails to connect:
[Sometimes ifconfig wlan0 down up does help].
- Force using access point in 2.4GHz mode: [Actually, disables 802.11n modulation in the 2.4GHz band.]
ifconfig wlan0 -ht40
[To use 5GHz mode, try ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev iwn0 mode 11na]
USB modems [GSM/UMTS]
- To switch a USB device into modem mode:
# apt-get install freebsd-ppp usb-modeswitch # usb_modeswitch -c /etc/usbmodeswitch.d/config.conf
# vi /etc/ppp/ppp.conf # ppp -foreground peername
Video drivers
- [Most?] Intel integrated graphics chipsets are supported.
- The Radeon series is good to use as-is. [May want to install firmware-linux-nonfree for microcode].
- For Nvidia there is only an old driver [non-free].
# apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel # apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nv # apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-radeon
- If you enable KMS, resolution increases in the console, and it is possible to deliver maximum performance in the X Window System:
# kldunload i915 # kldload i915kms # vi /etc/modules i915kms
[This should happen automatically now in jessie-kfreebsd]
Changing the default locale
# dpkg-reconfigure locales
- Select ja_JP.UTF-8 for Japanese, for example.
Keyboard settings of the X Window System
- It is recognized as English [QWERTY] keyboard unless set in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Keyboard detection in xorg uses hal on FreeBSD.
- [??? - 現状はウィンドウマネージャの起動後にウィンドウマネージャのキーボード設定やコマンドラインで対応している]
Web browser
- iceweasel package has not[!?] been provided. [Actually it is.]
- chromium browser is not available on kfreebsd.
- Flash is provided by upstream as a Linux-only binary, you may only use gnash [free-software alternative].
USB 3.0
- kfreebsd-image-10.1 provides xhci.ko
- Untested yet.
Sound driver
- FreeBSD uses OSS [rather than ALSA]
- Generally for sound you must load snd_hda.ko driver, used in many modern PCs.
- pulseaudio should work.
Power management
CPU clock is automatically controlled by powerd
$ sysctl dev.cpu.0.freq dev.cpu.0.freq: 800
- Battery status:
# /usr/sbin/acpiconf -i 0
- suspend mode [generally works OK]
- hibernate is untested [probably not implemented]
Mounting USB drives
Use the mount_msdosfs command
- Specifying the character encoding may be necessary:
# mount_msdosfs -L ja JP.UTF-8 -D CP932 /dev/da0s1 /mnt/usb
- exFAT, NTFS cannot be mounted currently. [Actually, NTFS mount is possible. Don't remember how to do this, but may need the fuse4bsd package installed.]
Linux emulation
- FreeBSD has a Linux binary compatibility layer.
- linux-i386 binaries can be executed.
Because of the Linux kernel API version being emulated, binaries from squeeze are suggested.
Use debootstrap to make a linux-i386 chroot
Virtualization
- What seems to work:
- FreeBSD Jails
- qemu
- Those that do not work yet:
VirtualBox [kfreebsd can run as a guest inside VirtualBox, but VirtualBox can't run on kfreebsd yet]
- bhyve [coming someday - a Debian ITP bug open for this]
Conclusion
- I tried to summarize how to set up Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
- I think this is a good opportunity to study the OS.
- [??? - まずは使ってみるところから初めてみるといいと思います]
- [Ask for help if you get stuck? - 使ってみて疑問や動かないところがありましたら、相談に乗ります]
- Aiming to make a stable release [jessie-kfreebsd] - Good luck! [Thanks!]