Daemonic Dispatches

FreeBSD/EC2: What I've been up to

I realized recently that there's very little awareness of the work which goes into keeping FreeBSD working on Amazon EC2 — for that matter, I often have trouble remembering what I've been fixing. As an experiment I'm going to start trying to record my work, both for public consumption and to help myself; I might end up posting monthly, but to start with I'm going to report on what I've been done in January through March of 2022.

January 2022

• I committed code I started working on 4.5 years earlier which speeds up the x86 boot process (including EC2) by roughly 2 seconds.
• Working with a few other FreeBSD developers, I helped to fix qemu breakage which was preventing EC2 arm64 images from building.
• I reported benchmarking results to Amazon which helped them fix a performance issue in their EFI boot code.
• I kicked the Lightsail team about updating their FreeBSD images.

February 2022

• I continued kicking the Lightsail team about updating their FreeBSD images.
• I handed out AWS credit codes (from my "AWS Hero" quota) to FreeBSD developers.
• I liaised with an Amazon developer working on fixing hotplug in arm64. (Work not ready for commit yet.)
• I committed a patch (not done by me, although I helped to review it) for obtaining entropy from EFI in the boot loader and passing it to the kernel; this ensures that arm64 EC2 instances have enough entropy for key generation when they first boot.
• I helped to debug more breakage affecting the release engineering AMI builds.
• I updated my EC2 boot scripts to fix the formatting of the SSH host keys, which had been broken by changes in the logger utility.

March 2022

• Lightsail finally updated to FreeBSD 12.3. I encouraged them to add a FreeBSD 13 offering as well.
• I investigated a bug report concerning encrypted EBS volumes; it seems to be as AWS bug and I convinced Amazonians to investigate.
• I closed a bug report concerning clock stability on T3 family instances; it resulted from an AWS bug which I have been told has now been fixed.
• I fixed a glitch in the release engineering build process which was resulting in 13.1 BETA AMIs not being registered in the Systems Manager Parameter Store.
• I wrote a patch to fix the console on EC2 arm64 instances; currently pending review.

In addition to the above, I have regular conference calls with Amazon and sometimes work on things which are NDAed (e.g. unreleased instance types); for obvious reasons I'm not going to write about those.

This work is supported by my FreeBSD/EC2 Patreon.