FreeBSD/EC2 lives

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2010-12-13-FreeBSD-on-EC2.html

by cperciva • 16 years ago

229 46 16 years ago

eddanger2• 16 years ago

I've been waiting for this for years! Amazon EC2 might have just jumped from a being novelty to something useful! (for me at least)

cperciva6• 16 years ago

I'd recommend waiting for some more bugs to be worked out before you start using this in production -- but please feel free to start launching instances and helping me find said bugs. :-)

eddanger2• 16 years ago

Indeed. Thanks for all your hard work, an impressive feat. You guys are unsung heroes in a world where we expect things to "just work".

Dobbs• 16 years ago

Thanks so much Colin. I'll probably be switching my play linode over to ec2.

Ixiaus3• 16 years ago

Great work Colin! I'm definitely going to jump on the free usage tier and experiment with it. I've been holding out, entirely, for FreeBSD to come to EC2.

gonzo• 16 years ago

very, very cool

dazzawazza• 16 years ago

Thanks for this. As a long term FreeBSD user it's great to have more platforms to deploy on.

tibbon• 16 years ago

Wait what? I thought that Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

Ixiaus3• 16 years ago

Dying? That may be true of the other BSD's but FreeBSD appears to be thriving; some very big companies, universities, &c... use and rely on FreeBSD. OpenBSD appears to be alive and well too, but from my perspective FreeBSD tends to have the spotlight.

lincolnq• 16 years ago

He's not serious. It's a classic Slashdot troll.

sgt• 16 years ago

Definitely not dying. In fact I think FreeBSD will just increase in popularity in the years to come. It had a bit of a dip in the last 3-4 years, but even from that it has shown how well the project holds up.

grammaton2• 16 years ago

Yhea, that must be why they're able to find contributers to do things like paravirtualize it. Because it's dying....

pan69• 16 years ago

I hope Linode and Slicehost follow soon. We could use more low cost *BSD virtualization.

carson• 16 years ago

Linode has actually been able to do NetBSD for a while: http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/NetBSD_howto

With a little work I'm sure this version of FreeBSD can be installed on Linode as well.

wwortiz• 16 years ago

FreeBSD is kind of another beast at this point in time, NetBSD support for xen is actually okay and it is pretty trivial to get it working, freebsd not so much.

Hopefully cperciva's work will pay off soon for a stable freebsd on Xen as I know there are plenty of users, me included, that would love this option.

Edit: and that linode post on how to get it running looks a bit dated

ams6110• 16 years ago

http://www.rootbsd.net/ is another choice. I'm happy with them.

cmer• 16 years ago

What are the benefits of BSD vs Linux? I could never quite understand why people would chose BSD, but that's likely just ignorance.

shin_lao2• 16 years ago

One could turn the tables around and wonder why people would chose Linux over BSD.

To me the biggest advantage is that BSD is fully integrated (it's a full system, not just a kernel) and there are compatibility guarantees. For example a binary built for 8.0 will stay compatible with the whole 8.x series.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

> BSD is fully integrated (it's a full system, not just a kernel) and there are compatibility guarantees.

That's true of Debian, too, though. We can disagree on which project does a better job at it, but they're both full systems, compatibility tested and with long-term support for stable releases.

Ixiaus3• 16 years ago

This topic has beaten to death, I will point you to this resource since it is an excellent exposition of both GNU/Linux's and FreeBSD's strengths: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01

tshtf• 16 years ago

Colin, excellent! BTW, how should we file bugs if/when we find them?

cperciva6• 16 years ago

Submit FreeBSD PRs or send me email -- or ideally both.

comice2• 16 years ago

[self-promote]: We at Brightbox have had FreeBSD 8.1+ support for a few weeks now: http://blog.brightbox.co.uk/posts/freebsd-cloud

shin_lao2• 16 years ago

I'd love to use a FreeBSD provider, but your page takes years to load. That's not the best promotion you can come up with, is it?

comice2• 16 years ago

We have a "sleep 3.years if user == 'shin_lao'" in there.

X-Istence2• 16 years ago

I got my beta key for you guys today! Awesome. Will have to give it a good spin!

jonhohle• 16 years ago

I've been looking for a way to move off of Joyent shared (solaris) and onto EC2 with FreeBSD for quite some time. This is awesome news. I honestly didn't know if this day would ever come.

sullrich• 16 years ago

This is really great news. Thanks a lot Colin and other FreeBSD devs!

listic3• 16 years ago

Congratulations!

Could you explain in layman's terms, where did the difficulties lie in using FreeBSD on EC2? Since I think I heard an announcement that FreeBSD 8 supports Xen domU, though I can't find any information to this effect now and FreeBSD Handbook doesn't mention it either: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/vi...

cperciva6• 16 years ago

FreeBSD's paravirtualized Xen support was a pile of crap. EC2 also had some minor quirks which I can't talk about (NDA).

jeremyjarvis• 16 years ago

Wait, you're under an NDA from Amazon? :s

listic3• 16 years ago

Should I be able to use FreeBSD on Spot Instances? I'm more interested in this for the future, when larger instance types will be available, but still.

Looks like I can't use any of the Community AMIs on Spot Instances at the moment.

Update: Yes, I can run ami-c01aeca9 on us-east as a Spot Instance! Though any other Community AMI I tried (e.g. Turnkey Linux AMIs) refused to work for me. Any comment on this is still welcome.

ifdnrg• 16 years ago

its quick to get a usable instance running, to get a usable ports tree,

csup -L 2 -h cvsup.FreeBSD.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile

looking forward to seeing stable on here

listic3• 16 years ago

Seems to be overloaded for me. I had sucess with this instead (is it the same? I'm noob at this):

csup -L 2 -h ftp6.us.freebsd.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile

kurin• 16 years ago

Yuck.

portsnap fetch extract

(yet more awesome software from cpersiva)

gry• 16 years ago

Thank you. I've heard fantastic things about FreeBSD for a while now, and now in combination with the micro instances, I can learn and experiment. My EC2 playground is already ported over to FreeBSD, portsnap updated, extracted with a fresh nginx install.

It's been a pleasure to use thus far. Thank you, again, Colin.

wunki• 16 years ago

Thanks Colin! You made my day.

Is there anything I can do to make this available to EU-West? Or should I just wait?

cperciva6• 16 years ago

Why do you need this in EU-West? I'm planning on building AMIs for the other regions once this is more production-ready, but at the moment I can't see why it would matter which region it's in.

grammaton2• 16 years ago

Oh, this just made my week. I can't wait to get my free tiny instance and start playing with my shiny new toy. I cut my Unix teeth on FreeBSD, and hearing that it's well on it's way into the cloud...well, frankly, I just squeeed a bit inside...

Thanks, Colin. A lot of people owe you a beer.

FreeBSD/EC2 lives

Related Stories