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

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comice
[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_lao
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?

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

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

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

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listic
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.

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jonhohle
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.

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

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cmer
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_lao
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.

~~~
_delirium
> 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.

~~~
burgerbrain
It's not true in the same way. Debian and GNU are two separate projects for
instance, but Debian relies on the GNU userland. Same goes with the kernel
obviously, and numerous other projects. The BSD projects however (for the most
part) do all their own code, all under a single source tree.

The merits of each method are up for debate, however they _are_ pretty
distinct.

~~~
_delirium
The extent of integration imo depends on what kind of system you're running.
For some systems, especially minimalist ones, I agree the BSDs tend to be more
integrated, though they do still heavily depend on third-party stuff (the
compiler, whether LLVM or GCC, being a big one).

However, once you start adding some additional packages, Debian tends to do
the integration-testing more pervasively across the entire userland,
"Debianizing" packages so that they all store things in the standard
locations, are started/stopped using the same methods, follow the same
configuration policies, etc. Once you get out into ports, the BSDs tend to
give you more of an as-is set of 3rd-party packages, and are pretty lax about
integration testing.

~~~
burgerbrain
> _(the compiler, whether LLVM or GCC, being a big one)._

Although I think the effort is misguided, they are working pretty hard on that
one. There is some considerable effort going on to get pcc as the default
compiler for the BSDs, specifically so that they don't have to rely on another
upstream (and so they don't have to use a GPL'd compiler).

However, once you start considering obviously 3rd party packages, then not
even windows could be considered a single project piece of software.

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eddanger
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)

~~~
cperciva
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. :-)

~~~
eddanger
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".

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

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listic
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...](http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/virtualization-
guest.html)

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

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

~~~
cperciva
I don't mind NDAs as long as they're reasonable and I get something out of
signing them. In general I'd rather know things and not be able to talk about
them than not know in the first place.

As FreeBSD security officer I handle 'do not disclose until date X'
information on a regular basis.

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pan69
I hope Linode and Slicehost follow soon. We could use more low cost *BSD
virtualization.

~~~
carson
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
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

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

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gry
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.

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grammaton
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.

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wunki
Thanks Colin! You made my day.

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

~~~
cperciva
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.

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ifdnrg
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

~~~
listic
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

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gonzo
very, very cool

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

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

