Links:
Wiki page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/BootTime
BSDCan talk slides URL: https://www.bsdcan.org/events/bsdcan_2023/sessions/session/116/slides/44/BSDCan23-Firecracker.pdf

Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva@FreeBSD.org>

Colin is coordinating efforts to speed up the FreeBSD boot process.

Recent efforts have moved from EC2 to the Firecracker virtual machine manager, which provides a very minimalist environment; stripping the boot process down to the bare minimum makes it easier to identify the remaining time and determine whether it can be optimized further.

With some experimental patches to both FreeBSD and Firecracker, it is now possible to boot a FreeBSD kernel in under 20 ms.

Some of the recent improvements were discussed in Colin’s Porting FreeBSD to Firecracker session at BSDCan.

This work is supported by his FreeBSD/EC2 Patreon.

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