Annvix Development Blog

Being a little bored tonight, I was actually contemplating how much effort it would be to rework Annvix to run on a BSD kernel than a Linux kernel. I see that the Gentoo folks are working on Gentoo/FreeBSD which is supposed to bring all of the goodies of Gentoo using a FreeBSD kernel. I find that very intriguing.

For Annvix it becomes even more interesting. The only purpose of Annvix is on servers. Linux strengths compared to BSD are hardware/desktop support. I wonder how much that carries over in terms of hardware used in servers… i.e. SATA drivers, network drivers, etc. Which are superior? I’ve often admired OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and I look at how many security advisories come out for *BSD (kernel-related) to the Linux distros (kernel-related). I should do some searching on MITRE’s site to see how many CVE names match up there.

Anyways, I’m sure it would be a lot of work. binutils would need to be patched, everything would need to be recompiled, you’d have to track FreeBSD’s kernel development (which would be ok except I’d probably have to match their toolchain versions, etc.). I suspect most stuff like rpm and so-on would work well enough with some work.

Would it be worth it? I don’t know. The longer it takes the Linux kernel folks to push a supported/stable 2.6 kernel, the more tempting something like this looks.

Of course, you could do it another way too. Make Annvix something that actually installs on top of FreeBSD. In other words, you’d install a bare-bones FreeBSD and instead of installing their ports, you’d install the “Annvix system” which would be binary, rpm-based packages. Then the core system updates (kernel, toolchain, etc.) would come from FreeBSD and Annvix is just like a set of precompiled ports on top of FreeBSD…

Things that make you go “hmmmmm”…

I’ve just setup our very own Annvix Pastebin where you can post code snippets, text configs, etc. I like the idea of pastebin, and it’s proven quite useful for other stuff (usually Mandriva work), and since it was pretty easy to setup, I’ve set it up so we can use it for sharing things for Annvix development.

Here’s a new testimonial I received today (thanks for sharing, Boyce!)

“I was looking for a small distribution that I could gain experience with that would also be secure and active. Annvix fits that bill for me. It has easy to use tools without the bloat that comes from bigger distributions. I use it as my reliable home server. It provides the services I need to my other computers like file sharing, iSCSI and HTTP in a way that I know I can rely on freeing me to experiment and learn without having to do a lot of maintenance.

Boyce Crownover - System Administrator
Watauga TX“