Server - Linux Compat

[andrew clarke]

On Tue 2008-09-23 17:38:57 UTC-0400, Grant Peel (gpeel at thenetnow.com) wrote:

> When I was young, many many moons ago, and I installed FreeBSD 4.4 for 
> the first time, I enabled linux compatability ...
>
> Each build since, I have enabled it ...
>
> So not I am at the point of asking myself why?

You only need to enable the Linux ABI module if you're running Linux
binaries.  On a server, this would be fairly uncommon.  On a desktop
machine you may decide that (for example) for whatever reason, the
FreeBSD port of Firefox (www/firefox) is not working properly for you,
so you might like to run the Linux binary of Firefox
(www/linux-firefox) under FreeBSD's Linux ABI.  But even that
situation is probably fairly rare.

> All I run is webservers and namesrvers, you know, Bind, Apache, Mysql,  
> vmpop3d, PHP, Exim and shh...

These have all been ported to FreeBSD.  They are built from the Ports
tree as FreeBSD binaries and run natively.

> not to mention a few utils, ipa, ipfw etc.

I'm not sure what ipa is, but ipfw is supplied with the FreeBSD base
system as a native FreeBSD binary, as you can tell from the following
command:

$ file /sbin/ipfw
/sbin/ipfw: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (FreeBSD), for FreeBSD 6.3, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped