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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).

• dictoss@live.jp

• 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:

  • https://www.debian.org/ports/.

  • Projects porting Debian to a variety of CPU architectures and kernels.
  • There are some official release architectures; some are unofficial.
• Debian GNU/kFreeBSD:

  • https://wiki.debian.org/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!]