kevans91

I've seen the occasional rumbling about folks wanting to use grub for one reason or another- while not necessarily ideal (having the caveats of a non-loader environment), I can see the value in it if you really don't need the amenities loader offers (debugging support, kmods).

Oh, this is cool! We'll need to check out this plugin mechanism as a thought for bectl -- it's fairly inflexible at the moment.

libze_util_temporary_mount would be a good candidate for using (or being replaced by?) the recently-introduced zfs_mount_at in libzfs once that's widely available enough. That was a fairly trivial addition to libzfs that was initially made to support libbe's be_mount(), which previously used the effectively non-portable amount() [post-mortem: should read zmount, but autocorrect is alwayscorrect]

Presumably it would be like FreeBSD's GELI, where early boot stuff would need to detect that it's looking at an encrypted root and know to prompt. In theory, this is relatively straightforward- with boot environments, the zpool bootfs property indicates the root dataset, so I wouldn't think you need to look too far.

[edit: this is done in our loader, so presumably you'd use grub?]

This is specifically w.r.t. FreeBSD -- nobody put in the effort to maintain it, so it's removed in head/ as of now. As far as I'm aware, no one had tested sparc64/llvm on FreeBSD either.

Nothing changes here- this is solely about removing GCC 4.2 from the base/ repository; ports are almost entirely unaffected, and the GCC ecosystem in ports is fairly healthy.

With a tiny caveat: most folks actually won't feel this, because GCC hasn't been included in any x86 installed base system for quite a while now. Most exposure to it for many users would have been if they were cross-building archs that still required it, as the build infrastructure would bootstrap an appropriate GCC4.2 at that time.

powerpc64 switched over in late December; sparc64 never made the switch (unfortunately), and mips will make the switch with the introduction of llvm 10.

IIRC powerpc32 is currently using clang with old bfd ld, but lld in llvm 10 may be quickly reaching the point where it's suitable for powerpc32 as well.

> [...] so I assume even with GCC support removed, you can still build FreeBSD, if you insist, with an external copy of modern GCC.

Indeed- "external toolchain" includes gcc6[0] and gcc9[1] ports that can be used specifically for building the FreeBSD base system. These are mostly easy to use, install the flavor for whatever architecture you're building and specify CROSS_TOOLCHAIN=<arch>-gcc6 when you build. More/better/complete information (and examples!) at [2].

[0] https://www.freshports.org/devel/freebsd-gcc6

[1] https://www.freshports.org/devel/freebsd-gcc9

[2] https://wiki.freebsd.org/ExternalToolchain

The search function on jQuery documentation makes me want to pull my hair out.

FWIW- Chromium was realllly unstable until the recent 52 -> 54 update that took place on the 22nd. Since then, it seems to be a lot more stable and performs better (on my crap hardware). I would definitely give it another shot.

It sounds like the author's just miffed about incompatibilities in general -- specifically, that they can't (necessarily) import python 2 code whilst running under a python 3 interpreter and vice versa.