Zcash on the FreeBSD Linuxulator

Zcash Apps
1

Has anybody tried getting Zcash to run under the FreeBSD Linuxulator? I see two potential ways to go about this:

  1. The obvious way: Compile under the CentOS 6 or 7 environment from ports. If this works, it might even make it into the ports tree (something like USES=linux:c7).

  2. The way which really intrigues me: Install the official apt.z.cash binary under a Debian jessie environment, via debootstrap (see below). Imagine typing apt-get install zcash on a FreeBSD box, without any virtualization!

I expect to be getting a suffuciently capable FreeBSD server soon. I want to know whether I should allocate a time/pain budget to try this route for getting Zcash working right now, since the FreeBSD Zcash port seems to be stalled. I do not have the peculiar combination of C++, heavy maths, and cryptographic implementation skills to tinker with libsnark, so I doubt I could really help with that.

(For those unfamiliar with FreeBSD, the Linuxulator is not an emulator. The FreeBSD kernel can use different syscall tables for different processes; and it provides a native implementation of Linux syscalls via loadable kernel module. Thus, there should be no performance hit. But despite my personal love affair with struct sysentvec, I myself have no experience with the Linuxulator, since I usually avoid running software for which portable source code is not available. Ahem.)

EDIT: The system deems me a “new user”, and will not let me make a post with more than two painstakingly gathered and Marked-down links. Thus, I stripped out the following:

  • FreeBSD Handbook on the Linuxulator. Can be found on FreeBSD dot org, under the Handbook.

  • Links to info about the CentOS ports (any word on which of C6 or C7 would work better with Zcash?).

  • Forum topic on installing Debian userland via debootstrap: https: // forums dot freebsd dot org/threads/41470/ (Sorry, it auto-linkifies if I don’t do that.)

Thanks, Discourse!