Links:
Firecracker VM

Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva@FreeBSD.org>

Firecracker is an open source "microVM" developed by Amazon Web Services; it is designed for the needs of "serverless" compute environments and has a particular focus on security and minimalism.

Starting in June 2022, Colin Percival has been working to port FreeBSD to run in the Firecracker environment, with significant assistance from other FreeBSD developers. As of this quarterly report, a set of patches are pending review which collectively add the needed support to make FreeBSD functional in a patched version of Firecracker.

In Q4 Colin intends to finish committing the relevant patches to FreeBSD, release a kernel and disk image so other FreeBSD users can experiment with Firecracker, and update and merge Firecracker patches which add PVH boot support (used by FreeBSD).

This work has already produced "spinoff" benefits in revealing ways to speed up the FreeBSD boot process; due to its low overhead and minimal environment, Firecracker is an excellent context to work on this.

This work is supported by Colin’s FreeBSD/EC2 Patreon.

Sponsor: https://www.patreon.com/cperciva