Bsd

This was a great outline of how to work with OCI containers on FreeBSD 14.2. I mentioned this the other day as an interesting new feature and this write-up covers how it all works. Podman has to run as root which seems risky, but FreeBSD takes security seriously and I’m sure that will change over time. I’ve not used Podman and want to give this a shot on BSD. I’ve used Docker quite a bit, but Podman seems to have some architectural differences that make it interesting.

FreeBSD 14.2 is out. The Register has a overview of the release. It’s very interesting that FreeBSD has adopted OCI containers. It’s a nice addition to jails and will be great for people (like me) coming from Linux. Since I don’t use a laptop, I haven’t had the upgrade troubles described in the article, but they sound quite annoying. I’ll update my BSD server as soon as I figure out some weird power issues that are occurring in my office.

I knew the background of macOS coming with the acquisition of NeXT and I understood NeXT to have roots in BSD, but the verification of macOS 15 as UNIX was a little surprising. While the back story is interesting, I’m not quite sure why Apple would bother with this at all? I suppose it’s nice to have a listing alongside of AIX and UnixWare. This claims it was done to avoid a lawsuit filed when Apple made claims about UNIX in advertising.

I was setting up some simple jails following the useful instructions in the FreeBSD Handbook. Setting up a thin jail using ZFS snapshots is pretty straightforward and I was able to get a jailed system up and running in short order. That’s when the fun began. I wanted to test a NGINX server running in the jail on an inherited IP. When I tried to do the install from the host using pkg -j thinjail install nginx-lite it failed essentially saying that it couldn’t connect to update the repository catalog.

After some deliberation, experimentation and research, I’ve decided to go with zsh as my interactive shell on FreeBSD. zsh has nice modern shell features that I’m missing when I’m at the shell prompt in sh, the default FreeBSD shell. Simple stuff like !! or !$ that I tend to use quite a bit. I’m most familiar with bash, but that seems to cut against the grain of FreeBSD. Also, zsh is the default on MacOS now so I use it quite freqently there.

Although the name is resonant of a Beyonce fan group, bhyve is an interesting hypervisor for FreeBSD. To get started, I followed the script in the FreeBSD Handbook and within about 5 minutes, had a FreeBSD guest running on a VM inside my FreeBSD host. I did get caught in a boot loop. Going to the shell and using shutdown -p now got me out of it and I was able to start the VM normally using sh /usr/share/examples/bhyve/vmrun.

One of the most interesting aspects of FreeBSD to me was the virtualization features. There are two main ones: jails and bhyve. I haven’t looked at bhyve in detail yet, but jails are very interesting. Jails are akin to LXD/LXD as they are both ways to improve on chroot. They are both more about system virtualization rather than the application virtualization approach of Docker. On a first comparison, creating a jail seems more involved than creating a container on LXD.

I had some passing familiarity with ZFS in Linux and it seemed interesting. On FreeBSD, ZFS is more core to the platform. There is lot to it but the concepts aren’t difficult. One of the core elements of ZFS are datasets. A dataset is sort of like a partition but more flexible. You can use them for snapshots and other things. A list of the datasets in a system is produced with zfs list:

Having been an Ubuntu user for many years, a new OS is taking some getting used to. Although there is a nice quickstart guide for Linux users on the FreeBSD website, there are still some things that are muscle memory for me that is requiring some more time. They are mostly around shell differences. sh is definitely not bash. I understand why bash isn’t in the base system due to licensing and a preference for simple solutions, but sh has a few limitations that seem to bite me.

I was poking around on my recently installed FreeBSD system and I noticed a strange message in /var/run/dmesg.boot that said est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.. That seemed odd, so I looked it up and found some information about what it was. It seems that the system was not set in the BIOS to allow the OS to manage the performance profile. It also led me to look at powerd to enable the performance mode.