A year of funded FreeBSD development
a year ago
- #FreeBSD
- #Open Source
- #Amazon EC2
- The author has been maintaining FreeBSD on Amazon EC2 since 2010 and became the FreeBSD release engineering lead in November 2023.
- Amazon sponsored the author for a year via GitHub Sponsors to work on FreeBSD release engineering and EC2 development, averaging 50 hours/month.
- Key achievements include managing four FreeBSD releases (13.4, 14.2, 13.5, 14.3) and addressing major EC2-specific issues like the 'power driver' for AWS Graviton instances and device hotplug.
- Significant improvements were made to FreeBSD boot performance on EC2, including fixes for entropy seeding and ZFS boot times.
- New FreeBSD AMI flavors were introduced: small AMIs (reduced disk space) and builder AMIs (customizable AMIs).
- The author optimized release builds by parallelizing processes and tackled build reproducibility issues using EC2 for testing.
- Future plans include continuing FreeBSD releases and EC2 maintenance but with reduced capacity for new features due to the end of sponsorship.