Not on this site, but still likely to be of interest, is my Tarsnap online backup service .
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Now, we don't want to truly change the observable behaviour of our software — but fortunately the C standard has a more liberal concept of "observable" than most people. In particular, the C standard states that the observable behaviour includes accesses to volatile objects . What is a volatile object, you ask? It is…
There are some caveats to this. First, at the moment only FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT can run under EC2; I haven't merged bug fixes back to the stable branches. Second, at the moment FreeBSD only runs on t1.micro instances, for reasons I can't discuss (NDA) but hope will be resolved soon. Third, this code hasn't received very…
I started working on this on June 20th mainly out of curiosity: I had heard that Firecracker had PVH boot support (which was in fact mistaken!) and I knew that FreeBSD could boot in PVH mode from Xen, so I wondered just how hard it would be to get FreeBSD up and running. Not impossible, as it turned out, but a bit…
The story of these attacks starts in late 2004. I had submitted my doctoral thesis and had a few months before flying back to Oxford for my defense, so I turned to some light reading: Intel's latest "Optimization Manual", full of tips on how to write faster code. (Eking out every last nanosecond of performance has…
There's just one small problem: The way POSIX has defined close(2) is completely and utterly broken.
Ever since the first EC2 instances launched — the ones which were retrospectively named "m1.small" — Amazon has relied on the Xen hypervisor. No longer: C5 instances use KVM. This sounds like it would be a problem, but in fact that change didn't bother FreeBSD at all: Now that everything uses hardware-based paging…
I tried building FreeBSD AMIs for the 32-bit EC2 instance types the same way as I did the 64-bit instances — by defenestrating Windows AMIs — but there was a catch: They wouldn't boot. In fact, when I tried this six months ago, they not only didn't boot, but they didn't even produce any console output to help me…
You're going to want to make some changes to what goes into that disk image later, but for now just build a disk image.
Once I finished writing ec2-boot-bench, the natural next step was to run some tests — in particular, to see how FreeBSD compared to other operating systems used in EC2. I used the c5.xlarge instance type and tested FreeBSD releases since 11.1-RELEASE (the first FreeBSD release which can run on the c5.xlarge instance…
As far as FreeBSD is concerned, Graviton 3 is mostly just a faster version of the Graviton 2: Most things "just work", and the things which don't work on Graviton 2 — hotplug devices and cleanly shutting down an instance via the EC2 API — also don't work on Graviton 3. (Want to help get these fixed? Sponsor my work on…
For lists of FreeBSD AMI IDs, please consult the appropriate FreeBSD release announcement; you can also launch FreeBSD through the AWS Marketplace .