[Week 6] Porting Microsoft's CoreCLR, CoreFX, and PowerShell to FreeBSD

[Mateus Rodrigues de Morais]

Hello all,

During this 6th week of work, I started working on getting a PowerShell build on FreeBSD. As I researched how its code is organized, I found out that on Linux and macOS, PowerShell Core relies on a native layer called libpsl that provides missing functionality from .NET Core as kernel system calls. As a result, this native layer also had to be built and ported over to FreeBSD. No code changes were necessary to get it built, however, out of the 32 unit tests, 3 were not passing.

I forked the PowerShell repo over to my GitHub account [1], fixed some code to work on FreeBSD and, as of right now, 2 out of these 3 tests are now passing. I’m working on the last one.

PowerShell itself is written in C# and runs on top of .NET. Therefore, I used the bootstrapped SDK from previous weeks to build it on FreeBSD and the steps [2] complete successfully. However, I see some misbehaviors while running PowerShell that I believe to be caused by managed code and I’ll investigate those further as soon as I get done with the native tests.

As of the CoreFX tests from last week, I’m still on the process of investigating those as well. Maybe some of them relate to the PowerShell misbehaviors or maybe they don’t.

[1] https://github.com/mateusrodrigues/PowerShell
[2] https://github.com/mateusrodrigues/gsoc18-progress/tree/master/powershell

Best,
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Mateus de Morais