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A year of funded FreeBSD development by cperciva

5 Comments

  • Post Author
    tiffanyh
    Posted June 6, 2025 at 8:43 pm

    Lots of respect for cperciva.

    Don’t know how he manages all of this + Tarsnap.

  • Post Author
    ksec
    Posted June 6, 2025 at 9:13 pm

    I was rather hoping Amazon would spend and contribute more. But it seems they basically only want to pay for the minimum FreeBSD support.

    Amazon isn't even on FreeBSD sponsors [1]. And Google only sponsored $9K last year. Apple isn't there. Edit: And Credit to Microsoft being at least on the list! And forgot to mention Meta / Facebook missing from it as well.

    I would have expect them to sponsor FreeBSD and OpenBSD annually by default given they use and continue to benefits the work out of both.

    [1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYea…

  • Post Author
    AndyKelley
    Posted June 6, 2025 at 9:38 pm

    Sweet! By the way we just added FreeBSD to the download page on ziglang.org (as of today), so FreeBSD users can grab master branch builds automatically built by the CI.

    It's also now a first-class supported cross-compilation target, including when linking libc, so you can do stuff like `zig cc -o hello hello.c -target riscv64-freebsd`.

    And then of course if you have any C/C++ dependencies, you can fetch and build them with the zig build system, so it should be possible to easily cross-compile even quite complex projects for FreeBSD now.

    Hopefully that helps more projects decide to add FreeBSD support and respective testing to their CI!

  • Post Author
    msdrigg
    Posted June 6, 2025 at 9:42 pm

    There are some hilarious tidbits in here

    > Starting in the first week of 2024, the FreeBSD boot process suddenly got about 3x slower. I started bisecting commits, and tracked it down to… a commit which increased the root disk size from 5 GB to 6 GB. Why? Well, I reached out to some of my friends at Amazon, and it turned out that the answer was somewhere between "magic" and "you really don't want to know"; but the important part for me was that increasing the root disk size to 8 GB restored performance to earlier levels.

  • Post Author
    net01
    Posted June 6, 2025 at 10:09 pm

    There is also a lot of work on the laptop front, I read that the BSD foundation invested $750k for this
    implementing: (S0ix Sleep State, etc )

    you can find the project laptop here https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop

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