How to start contributing

[Bill Wear]

a good Digital Ocean instance for kernel work is around $48 US,  but it has
so much usefulness otherwise: it can also be your website, email server,
news feeder, etc.  it's a good investment in your future.

On Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 5:54 PM Rick Macklem <rmacklem at uoguelph.ca> wrote:

> Austin Shafer wrote:
> > Manav Kumar wrote:
> [stuff snipped]
> >> And I have shortage of space and computation power, is there any
> alternative to generate the build without me purchasing new machine.
> >
> >Honestly you may have to rent the cheapest freebsd instance you can on
> >aws/digitalocean/ramnode/whatever and build there. The meta-mode route
> >also works but I'm guessing low-end hardware is going to run into
> >trouble building llvm if you don't have much RAM. I say give it a go on
> >your machine and see what happens.
> Yes, a "make buildworld" can be painfully slow, but can finish in a day or
> so on pretty well anything with a x86-64 cpu and a few Gbytes of RAM.
>
> However, depending on what you are working, you may rarely need to
> do so. Until about 1 year ago, my main FreeBSD development system was
> a Pentium4 (x86-32 or i386 in FreeBSD lingo) with 256Mbytes (yes, M, not G)
> of RAM and 40Gbytes of disk.
> (I never was crazy enough to "make buildworld" om this system,
>  but I'm mostly a kernel guy;-)
> FreeBSD is rapidly moving away from x86-32, so I would recommend
> something that is x86-64 (amd64 in FreeBSD speak).
> You can dual boot with Windows or Linux, but installation can be
> interesting
> and a little scary if you don't want to lose the other OS.
>
> --> As noted by Austin BELOW, you can easily build a kernel and you can
> usually
>       build userspace programs individually.
> --> When APIs/library changes make a full system upgrade desirable,
>        you can just install from an .iso snapshot instead of doing the
>       build yourself.
> --> If you become a committer, there are beefy build machines that
>       you have access to, to do the "universe" build to make sure your
> patch
>      builds on all arches.
>
> 20-30Gbytes of disk space should be enough and 50Gbytes is lots, from
> my experience.
>
> >If you're only working on kernel stuff, you could just build the kernel
> >(which literally any machine is capable of) and install it without
> >building world. YMMV
>
> Yes, agreed, as above.
>
> Good luck with whatever you choose, rick
>
> Just keep in mind people like that you want to contribute, but
> absolutely nobody is going to hold your hand and tell you how to do
> stuff. You just gotta dive in headfirst and you'll get your legs under
> you soon :) Again, the discord is active and people are very helpful there.
>
> Good luck!
>         Austin
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