from Hacker News

A year of funded FreeBSD development

by cperciva on 6/6/25, 7:35 PM with 126 comments

  • by AndyKelley on 6/6/25, 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!

  • by msdrigg on 6/6/25, 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.

  • by net01 on 6/6/25, 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

  • by tiffanyh on 6/6/25, 8:43 PM

    Lots of respect for cperciva.

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

  • by ksec on 6/6/25, 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...

  • by xedrac on 6/7/25, 3:48 AM

    I wanted to use FreeBSD for my home gateway/firewall/dns/dhcp server, but unfortunately my 10 GbE NICs didn't seem to have drivers, so I ended up going with Nix instead. I used FreeBSD many years ago as a workstation, and found the experience to be quite memorable. It's nice to see that it's still chugging along.

  • by irusensei on 6/7/25, 12:35 PM

    I remember the time around version 7 or 8 when FreeBSD had better drivers than Linux for stuff like Atheros wifi cards.

    I favored FreeBSD until around 2021 when computers with different CPU mixed together started to become common. I first bought a RockPro64 with 2 big and 4 little cores and then an Intel Alder lake. As far as I understand FreeBSD scheduler to this day don't know how to properly play with these so it brings the system to the lowest denominator of the slower cores.

  • by commandersaki on 6/7/25, 2:00 AM

    Out of curiosity, who are the top users of FreeBSD/EC2?

  • by nithssh on 6/7/25, 7:50 PM

    Very enlightening piece on how corpo sponsorship of OSS work. Thanks to the author for writing this.

  • by johnnyjeans on 6/7/25, 12:32 AM

    Can someone who uses FreeBSD fill me in on the niche that it fills in the Unix space? Why not use OpenBSD or NetBSD, which are far simpler and coherent? If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS, Nvidia drivers, ELF, etc. why not Linux? I'm well aware of the problems with GNU, but do you have problems even with something like Musl Void?

    I'm genuinely actually curious. FreeBSD exists in kind of a shadow realm for me where I've never been quite able to pin down the soul that keeps it chugging, but I know it exists somewhere in there.

  • by SSLy on 6/6/25, 11:10 PM

    colin, fix your encoding

  • by LAC-Tech on 6/7/25, 4:52 AM

    This does not paint a good picture for FreeBSD development. An operating system of that size and complexity surely needs someone company to sponsor the release manager full time, not part time for a year.

    I don't say this to besmirch FreeBSD, FWIW. I think it's very important that Linux is not the only game in town.