FreeBSD on AWS Graviton (t4g)

[Colin Percival]

On 1/1/21 4:33 AM, Rafal Lukawiecki wrote:
> 
>>> Oh, and a generic ARM issue: It's not a Tier 1 platform yet, so freebsd-update
>>> doesn't work and packages aren't always as up-to-date as on x86.  But I think
>>> those are being worked on...
> 
> Colin, would I be able to build an updated RELEASE in the AMI maker before I call mkami? In the days of 11.1 I had to recompile the kernel to use your patch (many thanks!) and so I did something like this:
> 
> $ svnlite --non-interactive --trust-server-cert-failures=unknown-ca co https://svn.freebsd.org/base/releng/11.1/ /usr/src/
> $ make DESTDIR=/mnt kernel -j16
> 
> I am not sure what magic is being done by the AMI maker itself to /mnt. I wonder if I could use this approach to build the kernel using the latest patched release of ARM, at least until it moves to Tier 1. Would I need to build the userland, too? Or are the security patches installed by freebsd-update only affecting the kernel?

You can make any changes you like.  Once you've SSHed into the AMI Builder,
you're running FreeBSD, you have FreeBSD installed onto the disk, and the
disk is mounted at /mnt, but those are all independent issues.

If you wanted you could launch the AMI Builder, unmount /mnt, and then write
a Linux disk image onto the disk.  (I can't imagine why you would want to,
of course.  But you're really not limited in what you can do.)

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid