With Debian Wheezy now frozen for its release sometime next year, here are some early benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian 6.0.5 “Squeeze” to the latest packages for the Debian 7.0 “Wheezy” release. For this Squeeze vs. Wheezy comparison, both Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD were benchmarked from an Intel 64-bit system.

With Debian 7.0 “Wheezy” set to be frozen soon, I took the opportunity to run some new benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Debian OS variant using the FreeBSD kernel rather than Linux, to compare it to Debian GNU/Linux as well as Ubuntu Linux and PC-BSD/FreeBSD 9.0.

Here are some benchmarks comparing Debian GNU/kFreeBSD with the new 9.0 kernel, Debian GNU/Linux with the Linux 3.2 kernel, and FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.0.

It’s not only the FreeBSD and PC-BSD camps gearing up for the imminent release of FreeBSD 9.0, but Debian developers have already been gearing up for the major update of this leading BSD distribution as they prepare to pull in its new kernel.

Yesterday I begun using Debian GNU/kFreeBSD “squeeze” in thorin, my main workstation. During the last few weeks I had to work through some of the limitations that were holding me back, such automated driver load and FUSE.

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was first released with Squeeze in last february. The “technology preview” label indicated, among other things, that it had a number of limitations when compared with what users would expect: missing features, incomplete functionality, etc.

This is a short guide on how to boot Debian GNU/kFreeBSD via network on a diskless machine, using GRUB as the bootloader.

As was reported recently, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port now has limited support for handling ZFS file-systems and its stock kernel has been upgraded against that of FreeBSD 8.1. Due to the upgraded kernel we ran a quick set of benchmarks to see how the performance of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to that of Debian Linux.

Depending upon your local hardware configuration and the software that is relevant to you, the outcome as to what operating system is the fastest between Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and FreeBSD may vary.

There has been an effort underway within the Debian development community to pull the FreeBSD kernel within this distribution to provide an alternative to using the Linux kernel. In essence with this Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project you have the standard Debian package set providing a GNU user-land with a GNU C library, but the FreeBSD kernel [...]

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port that consists of GNU userland using the GNU C library on top of FreeBSD’s kernel, coupled with the regular Debian package set.

In essence with this Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project you have the standard Debian package set providing a GNU user-land with a GNU C library, but the FreeBSD kernel is running underneath.

Now that Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is an official part of Debian, it is time to play around with the new toy. But in order to do such feat there are several issues that have to be resolved on the path to success.

Since today for kfreebsd-amd64, and probably tomorrow for kfreebsd-i386 too, the gnome metapackage is installable on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

The Debian Release Team is pleased to announce that it sees the port ofthe Debian system to the FreeBSD kernel fit to be handeld equal with theother release ports. The upcoming release codenamed ‘Squeeze’ is planned to be the first Debian distribution to be released with Linux and FreeBSD kernels.