FreeBSD Status Report Second Quarter 2023
www.freebsd.org
FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.

The FreeBSD foundation has made significant progress in contacting commercial FBSD users. They also wish for FreeBSD to have better tier 1 cloud support, and better documentation on Azure (the latter sponsored by Microsoft, may be good or bad).

Netflix (out of all companies) sponsors FreeBSD support of LinuxBoot, which is a boot firmware, that in fact, boots Linux (in case you didn’t know). The FBSD developers currently need help with the following things (taken directly from site):

  • loader.kboot(8) needs to be written. It should document how to use loader.kboot, how to create images, and the use cases that work today.
  • Finish amd64 support.
  • The current elf arch-specific metadata code is copied from efi. Unifying the kboot and efi copies is needed. While they are mostly the same, sharing is complicated by remaining compile-time differences. In addition, the build infrastructure makes sharing awkward.
  • It would be nice to add riscv64 support.
  • PowerPC testing (it has been untested since the refactoring started).
  • Creating a script to repackage EDK-II image (say, from QEMU) as a linux-boot image with a Linux kernel built on FreeBSD for CI testing.
  • Testing it from the coreboot LinuxBoot.

The Custer Administration Team has seemingly been successfull at finding mirrors (companies have provided hardware, however it has not been specified whether they are mirrors on the site), however, they still require a full mirror site with 5 servers within Europe specifically.

With the Honeyguide Group sponsoring, the FBSD team plans to make jails more akin to Docker images. Pot will be the FBSD equivalent of Dockerhub. This will be great for the development of FBSD, since Docker is a must-have feature for many developers.

Wazuh is an open source platform, which is used for threat prevention, detection, and response. The main goal is to make FreeBSD more visible as a cybersecurity platform. You can contribute if you wish.

All in all, many developments are being made in FBSD, and I think it may interest you to take a look.