Debian pushes development of kFreeBSD port

October 7th, 2009

The Debian Release Team is pleased to announce that it sees the port of the Debian system to the FreeBSD kernel fit to be handled equal with the other release ports. The upcoming release codenamed 'Squeeze' is planned to be the first Debian distribution to be released with Linux and FreeBSD kernels.

The kFreeBSD architectures for the AMD64/Intel EM64T and i386 processor architectures are now release architectures. Severe bugs on these architectures will be considered release critical the same way as bugs on other architectures like armel or i386 are. If a particular package does not build or work properly on such an architecture this problem is considered release-critical.

Debian's main motivation for the inclusion of the FreeBSD kernel into the official release process is the opportunity to offer to its users a broader choice of kernels and also include a kernel that provides features such as jails, the OpenBSD Packet Filter and support for NDIS drivers in the mainline kernel with full support.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free, community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Over three thousand volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Translated into over 30 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.