The FreeBSD Project

FreeBSD as a Tier 1 cloud-init Platform

Links:
cloud-init Website URL: https://cloud-init.io/
cloud-init Documentation URL: https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Contact: Mina Galić <freebsd@igalic.co>

cloud-init is the standard way of provisioning servers in the cloud. Over the past year and a half, thanks to this FreeBSD support has steadily improved. This year, together with cloud-init developers and the FreeBSD Foundation, we decided to explicitly focus on making improvements in FreeBSD itself, that will aid the cloud-init team to test future changes to FreeBSD code-paths themselves. To achieve this goal, I need to make FreeBSD run in LXD (and Incus), under the control of lxd-agent (or incus-agent).

Here are some improvements from the recent weeks:

I have written a small testing-framework (in sh, and I’m slowly porting it to OpenTofu/Terraform), which installs the latest version of net/cloud-init-devel or net/cloud-init and runs a couple of standard cloud-init tests.
To do this, I have created a dedicated public repository which contains the latest versions of net/cloud-init-devel and net/cloud-init for FreeBSD 13 and 14 on amd64 and aarch64.
I have ported Linux’s vsock testing framework to FreeBSD
I created a driver skeleton for a VirtIO Socket driver, based on the HyperV Socket driver.
In doing so, I made numerous improvements to HyperV sockets, some of which are accepted, others still need more work.
I have tested and released the latest 24.1 series cloud-init, where the cloud-init team and I have finally fixed some longstanding bugs, such as moving /run/cloud-init to /var/run/cloud-init on BSD, as well as fixing the homedir argument to user_groups to actually do something.
This release also sees numerous fixes to the OpenBSD code-paths from the community and not just me.
I have also started an official port for OpenBSD, but that work has stalled.

The work to come, in broad strokes:

Finish the FreeBSD VirtIO Socket driver.
Fix Go’s runtime to support VirtIO on FreeBSD.
Port lxd-agent’s dependencies to FreeBSD.
Port lxd-agent to FreeBSD.

That work will be interspersed with more improvements to cloud-init on BSDs, and more tests on different cloud providers.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Last modified on: April 13, 2024 by Maxim Konovalov