Package: kfreebsd-8 Severity: important Accomplishing our social contract, the FreeBSD kernel is being stripped of non-free parts [1][2] and #594940. However the social contract also says "We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of works that do not conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines" [3]. In that spirit there should at least be the /possibility/ to use non-free bits on Debian systems.
This is especially important, since many of the targetted kfreebsd users are merely system adminitrators (e.g. me) who want to use a ZFS based storage on their servers. Unfortunately pretty much every modern server comes with mounted NICs which do require some sort of firmware. In my case its the bce(4) aka bnx on Linux chipset used widely in IBM, HP and Dell servers. This firmware is being removed from the kfreebsd kernel leaving no (easy) possibility to use kfreebsd on such a server as there is no possibility to load non-free firmware at runtime, like we do on Linux. Its neither (easily) possible to rebuild the kernel from scratch including firmware, as the Debian specific patches don't cleanly apply if the firmware is not being removed and the resulting source tree is not easily to be built from source afterwards. The FreeBSD kernel supports [4] loadable firmware, but support for this is not included in kfreebsd currently, as far as I can tell. See also #594940 for more discussion on that. Please provide a mechanism to make kfreebsd .. er .. usable for some users. n.b.: This bug is filed against kfreebsd-8, but affects -9 in experimental equally which is built from a different source package. [1] "get-orig-source" http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/glibc-bsd/trunk/kfreebsd-8/debian/rules?view=markup [2] http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/glibc-bsd/trunk/kfreebsd-8/debian/prune.sh?view=markup [3] http://www.debian.org/social_contract [4] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=firmware -- System Information: Debian Release: wheezy/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing') Architecture: kfreebsd-amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: kFreeBSD 8.2-1-amd64 Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
