FreeBSD Port Team: Volunteers needed

[janhenke]

Following the discussion on the chat, I am looking for volunteers to start a FreeBSD port team.

The purpose is to have a group of people working together on making coreclr working well on FreeBSD. This includes having more people with FreeBSD experience for reviewing patches and keeping an eye on PRs.

This issue is intended to discuss this idea and as a means to get into contact with each other. Also technical discussions about porting to FreeBSD are possible.

[xied75]

My experience with FreeBSD is making VM template for CloudStack, if this can qualify I would like to join the team and picking up this brilliant OS on the way. :)

[MattWhilden]

it's likely that you're already aware of this fork but if not it's worth checking out: https://github.com/ajensenwaud/coreclr

[MattWhilden]

Ugh. Was too fast on the comment button. Meant to attempt to summon @ajensenwaud to the thread.

[richlander]

To provide some more context ... to make this project awesome, we'd want a core group of folks that felt ownership and accountability (in a good way) to make the project happen. In turn, the .NET Core team would be more compelled to invest in CI infrastructure for FreeBSD as a first class citizen.

I like the idea of "port team". Some of very best people the CLR team has ever had were on the "X64 port team", 10+ years ago. They simply referred to themselves as "the port team". Not the type of folks you'd want to meet in (technical) dark allies ;)

[kangaroo]

While I don't have the time to contribute significant resources to this, given the familiarities with OS X, I'm happy to support with code review, direction and suggestions. Feel free to @kangaroo me on issues.

[ghuntley]

Long time FreeBSD user/supporter.

I'd be keen to help out from an administrative/sysadmin/marketing/documentation role where needed.

@qbit (OpenBSD), @josteink (FreeBSD), @Aesthetikx (FreeBSD), @ajensenwaud (FreeBSD) and @kangaroo (OSX) have been involved in previous work to bring CoreCLR to BSD.

[richlander]

These PRs are relevant to this discussion: dotnet/coreclr#453, dotnet/coreclr#470.

Nice to see that they have been merged.

[josteink]

I mostly tried to help out in @ajensenwaud's repo as a sort of "challenge accepted" short-term project.

As I don't have any up-to-date FreeBSD production-systems, I doubt I'm a good candidate for a longer term FreeBSD "port team". I do agree about the name though. It has a nice ring to it. Go for it!

That said, I appreciate being summoned and namedropped in dotnet/coreclr. That's almost going on my resume ;)

[ajensenwaud]

Hi all

Thanks Jostein, appreciate your help so far!

I am very keen to still assist with the porting and can also assist with test infrastructure, as required. How many are in for this?

Anders

On 18 Mar 2015, at 20:47, Jostein Kjønigsen notifications@github.com wrote:

I mostly tried to help out in @ajensenwaud's repo as a sort of "challenge accepted" short-term project.

As I don't have any up-to-date FreeBSD production-systems, I doubt I'm a good candidate for a longer term FreeBSD "port team". I do agree about the name though. It has a nice ring to it. Go for it!

That said, I appreciate being summoned and namedropped in dotnet/coreclr. That's almost going on my resume ;)

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[qbit]

Maybe we should make a wiki with status of each port, next steps and hurdles? OpenBSD is stuck until libunwind is ready (unless coreclr people can confirm that isn't a hard dep?).

[janvorli]

You can start porting without the libunwind. It is required for exception handling and GC. So as long as an application doesn't throw an exception or initiate a GC, everything should work without the libunwind.
That's the way we were bringing up coreclr on Linux, the exception and GC support came quite recently.

[qbit]

👍 - I will keep hacking away then!

[janhenke]

Hi folks,

I did not answer earlier as I want to know how big the feedback is. So far I am happy to see quite some people eager to join this project.

One question we should answer though is whether we want separate *BSD teams (one for FreeBSD, one for OpenBSD, one for NetBSD) or one big BSD Port Team.
My experience is limited to FreeBSD so far, which by my understanding is also the most often used of the different *BSDs. But from what I read there seems quite some differences e.g. between OpenBSD and FreeBSD. So I have the tendency to limit the scope of the "FreeBSD Port Team" to FreeBSD only for the time being.

As @richlander proposed I would start a PR with a new Wiki page, describing the intention of the team, current members, agenda and way to participate. Currently I see as members:

• @janhenke
• @xied75
• @kangaroo
• @ghuntley
• @josteink
• @ajensenwaud

Also @qbit for OpenBSD.
As a rought list of people interesting. Would be nice to get an answer to the FreeBSD <-> OpenBSD <-> NetBSD question and a ack/nak to team memebrship from everyone in the list. Then I can prepare the wiki page based on that outcome. Best reply until Friday noon UTC. :)

[ghuntley]

Alright, have created an Azure virtual machine (2 cores, 3.5GB memory) running FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE which @josteink (and the others above) can call home for the foreseeable future whilst this issue is open. There's no NetBSD/OpenBSD images available in VMDepot, they were to magically appear then I would create another VMs for them as well.

Post a public ssh-key here and I will create you an account on portteam.cloudapp.net that has sudo access. Treat it with respect but don't be afraid to break it as it can be recreated as needed with a simple shell script.

[josteink]

I'm pretty busy these days, so I'm definitely not making any promises.

Anyway, I appreciate @ghuntley's initiative, and to show that, here's an SSH-key which means that in theory I can contribute should I ever get the time:

ssh-rsa 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 jostein@irssi

Anyone else?