[Soc-coordination] kFreeBSD progress report week 2

[Luca Favatella]

During the "Community Bonding Period", I played a bit with the boot
sequence on GNU/kFreeBSD by updating [ging].
I didn't manage to make it completing the boot sequence, but it was useful.
Then I evaluated the work to do on debian-installer; i.e. I
-tracked previous attempts to port it to GNU/kFreeBSD (see [cbp0])
-played a bit with the its image creation process on GNU/Linux
-looked at which udebs were missing on GNU/kFreeBSD (see [cbp1])
Then I started to port BusyBox udeb, producing some patches and
getting some of them merged upstream (see [cbp2]).



Since coding period start, I have worked on porting BusyBox udeb on
GNU/kFreeBSD.
Now BusyBox should have enough features to work in debian-installer,
except for networking.


I tried to test BusyBox init in a Debian GNU/kFreeBSD virtual machine,
substituting /sbin/init.
I had no success because "BusyBox init doesn't support multiple
runlevels" (from busybox man page).
See the first part of [cp0].

I gradually enabled more and more useful BusyBox config options.

Some of them built without patches needed (probably I had disabled
them to have no problems).
See the second part of [cp0] and the "updates" of [cp1].

The config options that needed some work are
-CONFIG_SWAPONOFF
-CONFIG_MOUNT
-CONFIG_UMOUNT
I tested BusyBox mount and umount with success.
See [cp2].


There are currently 10 disabled BusyBox config options on GNU/kFreeBSD.

Needed networking related ones should be
-CONFIG_IP
-CONFIG_ROUTE
-CONFIG_APP_UDHCPC
-CONFIG_FEATURE_UDHCPC_ARPING

CONFIG_PIVOT_ROOT should be Linux specific and unneeded for kFreeBSD
boot process.

Some of them look not important at the moment
-CONFIG_MONOTONIC_SYSCALL
-CONFIG_DMESG
-CONFIG_FREERAMDISK
-CONFIG_FEATURE_MOUNT_LOOP
-CONFIG_KLOGD


To try my work on BusyBox
-install Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (see [try0], at the moment there is no
official Debian GNU/kFreeBSD virtual machine image)
-download (e.g. using wget) the .deb package I built [try1] with my patches
-install it (as root): "dpkg -i busybox_1.13.3-1_kfreebsd-i386.deb"

To test e.g. BusyBox mount and umount with a USB memory
-create a mount point (as root): "mkdir /media/test/"
-connect the USB memory; at this point running "ls /dev/msdosfs/" you
should see a (special) file with the name of the USB memory, e.g.
"MY_USB_MEMORY"
-mount it (using BusyBox mount): "busybox mount -t msdosfs
/dev/msdosfs/MY_USB_MEMORY /media/test/"
-read/write on it; e.g. see the content: "ls /media/test/"
-umount it: "umount /media/test/"



In the next weeks I should work on producing debian-installer images,
even not fully functional but at least that boots, and porting the
other udebs needed for debian-installer, that I previously examined
(see [cp3]), i.e. the kernel and
-module-init-tools-udeb
-netcfg
-partconf-find-partitions
-partconf-mkfstab




Luca Favatella





[ging] http://glibc-bsd.alioth.debian.org/ging/

[cbp0] http://slackydeb.blogspot.com/2009/04/previous-attempts-to-port-d-i-to_27.html
[cbp1] http://slackydeb.blogspot.com/2009/04/analysis-of-differences-between.html
[cbp2] http://slackydeb.blogspot.com/2009/05/2-little-porting-fixes-sent-to-busybox.html

[cp0] http://slackydeb.blogspot.com/2009/05/busybox-failed-test-and-other-config.html
[cp1] http://slackydeb.blogspot.com/2009/05/busybox-status-on-gnukfreebsd.html
[cp2] http://slackydeb.blogspot.com/2009/06/busybox-mount-builds-on-gnukfreebsd.html
[cp3] http://slackydeb.blogspot.com/2009/04/analysis-of-differences-between.html

[try0] http://glibc-bsd.alioth.debian.org/doc/
[try1] http://slackydeb.altervista.org/files/debian_gnu_kfreebsd/gsoc2009_kfreebsd_progress_report_week_2/busybox_1.13.3-1_kfreebsd-i386.deb