Helping to improve FreeBSD support

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Wed, 2024-07-17 at 20:54 -0700, John Hixson via samba-technical
wrote:
> Howdy!
> 
> Would Samba be interested in better FreeBSD support? I am reaching out
> on behalf of the FreeBSD Foundation. We would like to help improve
> support in whatever way we can. What needs to happen? 
> 
> For starters, I would like to help get as many of our port patches
> upstreamed as possible. I would also be interested in helping out in
> areas that are specific to FreeBSD. It would also be nice to have some
> CI setup.

Yes, getting all port patches upstreamed is the first place to start.
 It also helps vet them, which is useful for all.

For Other tasks:
 - I did wonder if one useful task could be to have a non-glibc libc
container on Linux in our GitLab CI, to show we have no assumptions
about using glibc.

 - Have a container in the GitLab CI cross-compile to FreeBSD.  This
might help better test our cross-compile infrastructure and check we
can compile for FreeBSD

But the really hard but really valuable goal would be to have that
cross-compilation get run on a FreeBSD Kernel, but still in our GitLab
CI on Linux hosts.  

A bit insane but what if the cross-compiled results were injected into
FreeBSD running on qemu (x86_64 on x86_64 without kvm) in the Docker
container?

> Interested? Where to go from here? 

I would say we are.  I'll leave it for others to follow up with you
more, but I did want to say that we always want better collaboration
with those that package and port Samba.

The main constraints on the CI is that we use GitLab for our CI, and we
use Linux hosts for the GitLab CI runners.  

We avoid needing to assume our users in the shared dev repo need to be
fully trusted, so our runners that we provide are single-use VMs, or
the same that GitLab graciously provides. 

Andrew Bartlett

> Cheers!
> 
> - John

-- 
Andrew Bartlett (he/him) https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Samba Team Member (since 2001) https://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba