[conspire] Generic Linux?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (tony at of.net):

[snip most of a well-crafted post:]

> And there's also Nexenta, which is Debian on a Solaris kernel.  Not
> sure if they intend to fold into Solaris or Debian.org.

(No, on that question, I'm pretty sure.)  Nexenta is my very favourite
way to get ZFS.  Nice work.

> Re Debian/mac:
> 
> I suppose one of the BSDs Debians could be ported to the Mac but given
> there's a bit of Apple proprietary stuff added to the BSD kernel,
> couldn't be released freely, so I doubt if Debian would go for it.

As I'm sure you know, the all-open-source core of OS X, omitting the
proprietary bits you allude to including a fair number of drivers and
other xnu kernel code, is available as a standalone OS called Darwin,
which is basically a slightly funky cousin to NetBSD/FreeBSD.

Quite a few years back, I tried to install a few releases of Darwin x86
onto my knockaround VA Research StartX MP, and they always failed on
recognising the SCSI HBA, which is/was a bog-standard Adaptec thing.
So, I get the impression it is (or at least was) pretty shy on hardware
support.  But, anyway, there really wouldn't be a lot of point in
running Darwin -- and therefore wouldn't be a whole lot of point in
Debian on OS X / Darwin's xnu kernel.  If you want a BSD kernel, the
FreeBSD and NetBSD ones are honestly a better choice than is xnu without
its proprietary bits.