FreeBSD-similar build-from-source Linux?

[O. Hartmann]

On 11/10/10 19:07, App Deb wrote:
> 2010/11/10 O. Hartmann<ohartman at zedat.fu-berlin.de>:
>> Hello out there,
>>
>> well, my question may sound heretic, but since we use mostly Linux based
>> systems in our scientific environment and FreeBSD seems to lack in severe
>> support in GPGPU/CUDA capable graphics boards I need to setup a kind of
>> Linux facility to ensure having the software and tools I need for my work.
>> I'm looking for a Linux distribution that is similar handled like FreeBSD,
>> where I'm able to rebuild the whole system from sources, not even the the
>> Linux kernel, also the GNU tools and the packages. Maybe there are some
>> people out here having already taken this step.
>> Any suggestion is appreciated,
>
> The NVIDIA FreeBSD driver provides the cuda libraries for linux compatibilty.
>
> So 32-bit Linux Cuda applications should work on FreeBSD.

Well, 32-Bit isn't realistic in a scientific environment! There are some 
'tricks' and 'tweaks' out making CUDA working on FreeBSD with Linux 
binaries, but, simply for instance, portions of our computing system 
rely on OpenLDAP and I do have severe problems making OpenLDAP 
authorised users available to some IDL applications running on FreeBSD 
boxes within the linuxulator. This is only one small but very effective 
trap one can step into.

There are some other, very serious questions. AMD calims that they made 
the specs of their 3D chipset internals public. There is OpenCL as an 
open standard, there is the CLANG/LLVM project even for FreeBSD to 
become the new standard compiler and, not at last, there is work done on 
drivers for AMD graphics boards but there is no, not even rudimentary, 
support for GPGPU. I preferr a clean open source solution, but at the 
moment, it seems to be the best and easiest path to switch to an 
operating system that is fully supported, even 64 bit.