[HN Gopher] A year of funded FreeBSD development
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A year of funded FreeBSD development
Author : cperciva
Score : 112 points
Date : 2025-06-06 19:35 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.daemonology.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.daemonology.net)
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Lots of respect for cperciva.
|
| Don't know how he manages all of this + Tarsnap.
| cperciva wrote:
| It turns out that at a certain point, money can buy time. Do I
| fix the leaky tap myself, or hire a plumber? After electricians
| rip up my basement drywall (perfectly reasonably -- I was
| getting solar panels installed and the electrical panel needed
| to be upgraded) do I fix it myself or do I hire a professional
| drywaller?
|
| To be fair, some of the time I spent on this came away from
| Tarsnap. But less than you might imagine.
| Alupis wrote:
| > or do I hire a professional drywaller
|
| When it comes to drywall, always hire a professional. Learn
| from other's mistakes... it's not as easy as you think and it
| won't turn out well.
| cperciva wrote:
| True. In this case it was drywall in a poorly lit basement,
| so I wasn't all that concerned about it turning out
| perfectly -- but it absolutely did turn out much better
| than it would have if I tried to do it myself.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| At a certain point money can even buy money.
|
| The other day I had the opportunity to get a 10% discount on
| a fridge if I could pay the whole thing in one payment. If I
| didn't have the money I wouldn't get the discount, so in a
| way being poor means everything is more expensive.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Being more poor is always more expensive than being less
| poor.
|
| All poor people know this in their bones because they face
| this every day of their lives.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Maybe he doesn't:
|
| https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical...
|
| > Tarsnap critical security bug Tarsnap versions 1.0.22 through
| 1.0.27 have a critical security bug. It may be possible for me,
| Amazon, or US government agencies with access to Amazon's
| datacenters to decrypt data stored with those versions of
| Tarsnap
| tedunangst wrote:
| A fourteen year old bug is relevant how?
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| If you've found a method to write software that is 100% bug-
| free, we're all ears.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I mean this is Hacker News, they're going to say Rust :)
| cperciva wrote:
| Rust would not have prevented that bug.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| There are bugs and then there are BUGS!
| ksec wrote:
| 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...
| cperciva wrote:
| I'd love to see Amazon contribute more, of course; but the fact
| they don't show up as donors to the FreeBSD Foundation doesn't
| mean they're not supporting FreeBSD. The money they paid me
| didn't flow through the Foundation, for example; I'd guess that
| Foundation-funded development is maybe 10% of all corporate-
| funded FreeBSD development. (It's an important 10%, especially
| because it can be focused on "what does FreeBSD need" rather
| than "what does company X need" -- but it's still a small
| minority.)
| vitorsr wrote:
| This comment does not present the full picture.
|
| First, it presents the snapshot of donations within a given
| year to the Foundation. The history of donations is not
| represented by definition.
|
| Second, it does not present contributed development. Those are
| typically summarily available on the release notes of each
| release [1].
|
| [1] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| Why lie? Apple is on the page you linked if you switch to
| Corporate/individual
| p_ing wrote:
| I wonder for what reason Microsoft funds them. Their Hyper-V
| extensions are not as complete as Linux. There's no Microsoft-
| supported port of .NET. I can't think of any services that run
| on *BSD from Microsoft, cloud or otherwise.
| cperciva wrote:
| I don't know, but Microsoft has some developers working on
| Hyper-V for FreeBSD. They've even come to FreeBSD developer
| summits.
| voidfunc wrote:
| There are customers that run FreeBSD on Azure and Microsoft
| officially supports it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/azure/virtual-machines/lin...
| AndyKelley wrote:
| 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!
| msdrigg wrote:
| 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.
| xandrius wrote:
| Now I really want to know though.
| cperciva wrote:
| My understanding is that EBS has some heuristics for deciding
| whether to keep data cached; an AMI which has a cached
| snapshot as its root disk will boot much faster than an AMI
| where all the data needs to be pulled from S3.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Some huge customer chunked their data into 5GB pieces so
| now there's a "if size == 5GB" in the cache code.
| cperciva wrote:
| Maybe, but I don't think that would explain 8 GB also
| being fast while 6 GB is slow?
| net01 wrote:
| 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
| cperciva wrote:
| Yep there's a lot of work going on. I was just writing about
| the work _I_ was doing. ;-)
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(page generated 2025-06-06 23:00 UTC)