On Friday, September 12, 2003, at 10:03 PM, Frank Roberts - SOTL wrote:
> My question is to what degree are they interchangeable for a desktop
> [NOT a
> server or router] box? Exactly how difficult would it be for say a RMS
> to use
> any one of the four kernels is say a Mandrake or a Red Hat?
So, your basic question is whether one could use a BSD kernel with a
Linux userland, or vice versa?
It's certainly possible. In fact, Debian has ports to the FreeBSD and
NetBSD kernels.
95% of the stuff in a Linux distribution doesn't really care what kind
of kernel is underneath, it just uses standard system and library calls
to perform tasks. Some of the system utilities probably expect certain
calls or interfaces to be present that vary between the BSD and Linux
kernels; for example, things that read files in /proc.
Making the necessary modifications for this to work isn't hard at all,
it's just tedious. Somebody would have to figure out which programs
rely on Linux-specific interfaces, and re-write those parts to work
with a BSD kernel. I suspect that would be a short list though.
The same process would have to be done for the system libraries as
well, since they call into the kernel also.
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