FreeBSD on EC2 maybe real now ?

[John Prather]

I'm not familiar with EC2 myself yet, but I did play with FreeBSD
booted out of pvgrub on linode's xen system.

It was something of a pain, and required their finnix linux setup
(some rescue linux system that they offer which did not consume my own
paid-for disk volumes) to write the OS disk image to a volume, create
the /boot fs and put the kernel into it, etc.  (linode uses paravirt
which resulted in unstable FreeBSD, so I never did get a Linode
FreeBSD system setup that was acceptable)

Depending on the ability to run one of their own provided systems on a
very tiny portion of available volume space in order to put the
FreeBSD pieces into place, it might be similar.

I used this as my guide:

http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/NetBSD_howto

Which I had to make heavy modifications to because FreeBSD != NetBSD
(for instance, netbsd apparently compiles under linux)

Using my experience applying that info to FreeBSD, I threw together
some documentation about all the failures I had getting FreeBSD to be
stable on paravirt.

http://wiki.interwebfun.org/index.php?title=FreeBSD_XEN_Guests

I imagine one of the more relevant portions of this page would be
"Building XEN Kernels" and "Creating Disk Image".

The former shows how I built XEN kernels on my local desktop for this.
 The latter details how I created the disk image for the OS volume.
Apparently I did not detail how I setup the boot fs with the kernel
image(s), so refer to the NetBSD_howto page for copying the kernels
over and booting them.

Keep in mind that these are suggestions for a starting point when
trying to setup FreeBSD on a remote system with pvgrub, and almost
everything will need to be considered and adjusted for amazon's EC2
environment.   I had FreeBSD 7.2 with xen patches happily booting from
pvgrub on Linode's xen system, but 7.3, 8.0, 9.0 were all terribly
unstable, and most would not even boot in SMP.   I'm under the
impression that HVM is far more reliable than ParaVirt for FreeBSD,
however I don't know what EC2 provides.

I will probably play around with this a bit myself in the coming
weeks.  If i run into some success, I will post an update with more
useful information.


-john





On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 6:47 AM, Zladivliba Voskuy <nospampam at hotmail.fr> wrote:
>
> Hey guys !
>
> It seems there's a little hope to make progress with FreeBSD on EC2, as Amazon posted this announcement : http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/07/use-your-own-kernel-with-amazon-ec2.html
>
> I couldn't read the documentation about how to do this but they say "You could (if you are sufficiently adept) use this facility to launch an operating system that we don't support directly (e.g. FreeBSD). If you manage to do this, please feel free to let me know".
>
> Does anyone knows how to do this actually ? Or is this really possible ?
>
> I've been waiting for an FreeBSD ec2 image for years now ! I know there's a lot of persons waiting also around so if anyone knows how to make this happen, please post somehting !!!!
>
> Thanks !
> Z.
>
>
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