Two and a half years of work is far too much to describe in a single issue, and several articles in both past and future issues highlight work done during this release cycle.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the latest issue. The FreeBSD Journal continues to be the best way to stay informed about everything FreeBSD. It is now available in HTML format. Please take a moment to read the issue, share with your colleagues, and remember the FreeBSD Journal is always free.

As with past year-end reviews, let’s begin by reporting the broadest metric, commit data. From January 1 until mid-December, 1082 of the 7060 commits to the src repository identify the FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor. That’s about 15% of the total src commits and about 34% of all sponsored commits, percentages that very closely match those from 2022.

Traditionally, nearly all of the Foundation-sponsored work that finds its way into FreeBSD ends up in the src tree.  This year marked an exception, though, as we funded one dedicated ports project. While sponsored contributions constitute a modest portion of ports development, in 2023, approximately half of the sponsored ports commits originated from the Foundation.

Summary statistics provide a sweeping overview of the Foundation’s commitment to directly improving FreeBSD. To gain a comprehensive understanding, let’s explore the projects undertaken this year that advance us toward achieving the objectives outlined in our technology roadmap.

DTrace is a framework that gives administrators and kernel developers the ability to observe kernel behavior in real time. It includes kernel modules called “providers” that perform particular instrumentation in the kernel using “probes”. kinst is a new low-level DTrace provider co-authored by Christos Margiolis and Mark Johnston for FreeBSD. It allows the user to trace arbitrary instructions and is part of the base system as of FreeBSD 14.0. Christos completed a project in 2023 to implement a much-requested DTrace feature, inline function tracing. For inline tracing, kinst makes use of the DWARF debugging standard to be able to detect inline calls and create probes for each one of them. In the future, this functionality could be leveraged to address some of the shortcomings of FBT, such as the tail-call optimization problem and the absence of inline tracing capabilities. Christos also ported kinst to riscv and arm64. Those interested in Christos’s work can learn more from his EuroBSDCon 2023 talk.

RAID-Z expansion enables the gradual addition of disks to a RAID-Z group so storage capacity can be expanded incrementally. This functionality will be particularly valuable for smaller pools when it may be impractical to add enough disks to incorporate an entire new RAID-Z group at once. It’s been a long road since the Foundation first sponsored Matt Ahrens to begin this project, but 2023 marks a major milestone: the merging of the pull request to the main branch of the OpenZFS repository and from there into FreeBSD main.  Matt recently shared his thoughts on the milestone.

“The OpenZFS community is grateful for the contributions of everyone who made RAIDZ for ZFS a reality. This feature is going to have a broad impact on many storage use cases due to its positive design implications, including compatibility with RAIDZ-1, RAIDZ-2, and RAIDZ-3 configurations. We are particularly grateful for the support of the FreeBSD Foundation and iXSystems in making this feature generally available.”

For technical information about RAID-Z expansion, refer to Matt’s talk at the 2021 FreeBSD Developer Summit (video) (slides) and this news article from Ars Technica.

The UFS/FFS filesystem has long permitted snapshots, even when using softupdates. However, snapshots could not be taken on filesystems using journaled soft updates until this year when the Foundation sponsored Marshall Kirk McKusick to implement the feature. This project involved substantial modifications to the UFS/FFS soft updates and snapshot kernel code, as well as adjustments to the fsck_ffs utility. Two scenarios highlight the importance of UFS snapshots. First, they enable reliable dumps of live filesystem dumps, avoiding potentially prolonged periods of downtime. Second, they facilitate the execution of background fsck, akin to the need for ZFS scrubbing. Periodic fsck runs are essential for uncovering undetected disk failures, and snapshots allow fsck to operate on live filesystems without the need for scheduled downtime. You can read the 2022Q4 status report Kirk prepared around the project’s outset.

In September, Olivier Certner joined the FreeBSD Foundation as a general FreeBSD developer. Olivier has extensive expertise in concurrent, parallel, distributed, and asynchronous programming and brings valuable experience from various roles in the finance sector. During his relatively short time with the Foundation, Olivier has already made meaningful contributions to FreeBSD, including:

The Foundation also maintains long-term contracts with four other developers: John Baldwin, Konstantin Belousov, Mitchell Horne, and Mark Johnston. Our contract with John is narrow in scope, focusing on fixing pressing security issues. For example, in 2023, John addressed bugs in netsmb (SMB protocol communicator), bhyve, and cd9660 (driver to access cd9660 file system). As of the time of writing, Konstantin committed 247 fixes and improvements to various parts of the src tree, including libcxx, bhyve, memory management, dtrace, and kqueue, to name a few. Mitchell continued to improve our support for RISC-V hardware but also contributed work to other parts of the tree, including pmc (performance monitoring counter), dtrace, and mac (mandatory access control).  Mitchell also dedicated time to improving documentation, including overhauling manual pages and writing other kernel and developer documentation. Like the others, Mark contributed to many different parts of the src tree, such as vmm (bhyve virtual machine monitor), makefs (file system image generator), and netlink (kernel network configuration protocol). All four developers allocated significant time to reviewing work from fellow developers and contributors, and Mark mentored and acted as a technical monitor for other projects.

Probably the most common request we hear from users is for better wireless networking on FreeBSD. They want support for the latest chipsets, faster speeds, and improved stability. While Foundation contractor Bjoern Zeeb has made significant improvements to the net80211 LinuxKPI and the drivers that use it, such as iwlwifi, one person on a limited, part-time contract is insufficient to make the timely improvements that FreeBSD users expect. As such, the FreeBSD Foundation contracted two new developers to focus solely on wireless improvements. En-Wei Wu, a 2022 Google Summer of Code Contributor, began an internship with the FreeBSD Foundation in early 2023. The main focus was to continue work to extend wtap(4), a net80211(4) Wi-Fi simulator, with added capabilities. As wtap(4) becomes a more general 802.11 simulator, it becomes increasingly more useful for net80211(4) development and debugging. In the fourth quarter of this year, the Foundation began contracting FreeBSD developer Cheng Cui to work full-time on wireless networking. A main goal for Cheng’s project is to integrate 802.11ac infrastructure required to support iwlwifi. Look for more wireless work from Bjoern and new work from Cheng to hit the tree in the coming months.

Vector Packet Processing (VPP) is an open-source, high-performance user space networking stack that provides fast packet processing suitable for software-defined networking and network function virtualization applications. VPP aims to optimize packet processing through vectorized operations and parallelism, making it well-suited for high-speed networking applications. In November of this year, the Foundation began a contract with Tom Jones, a FreeBSD developer specializing in network performance, to port VPP to FreeBSD. Under the contract, Tom will also allocate time for other tasks such as testing FreeBSD on common virtualization platforms to improve the desktop experience, improving hardware support on arm64 platforms, and adding support for low power idle on Intel and arm64 hardware.

For the summer of 2023, Jake Freeland interned with the Foundation to work on Capsicum, FreeBSD’s sandbox framework. Capsicum was built to limit the capabilities given to applications and libraries. The internship involved working on different projects with the primary goal of improving the developer experience when Capsicumizing their existing programs. The biggest enemy of Capsicum is its large learning curve. Refactoring a program to support capability mode often requires the developer to know the causes of Capsicum violations and how to restructure the program to avoid the violations. Sometimes this process is trivial, but larger programs often need resources on demand, and figuring out how to serve these needs can be difficult. Jake extended the number of tools available to the developer to make Capsicumization easier, and the hope is that more developers will adopt it. For those interested in Capsicum, check out Jake’s blog post, Sandbox Your Program Using FreeBSD’s Capsicum.

The FreeBSD Foundation contracted Pierre Pronchery as a Userland Software Developer, and his first task was to import OpenSSL v3 into our base system in preparation for FreeBSD 14.0. OpenSSL is a library for general-purpose cryptography and secure communication. It provides an open source implementation of the SSL and TLS network protocols, which are widely used in applications such as e-mail, instant messaging, Voice over IP (VoIP), or, more prominently, the global Web (aka HTTPS). To describe OpenSSL 3 as a major release is an understatement, and Pierre dedicated significant time not only on importing the new library but dealing with many required changes to other parts of the tree.

With the update of OpenSSL to version 3, many new build errors were introduced to the ports tree. To fix these issues before the release of FreeBSD 14.0, the Foundation contracted Muhammad Moinur (Moin) Rahman to complete the time-consuming and tedious work of fixing all port issues related to the update to OpenSSL 3.

In July 2023, Yan-Hao Wang began a summer internship with the Foundation to work on a variety of tasks. He improved our testing framework by adding new tests, such as one for gunion(8), and he created new documentation tools, such as an online editor for translating documents and man pages.

Modern computer architectures provide SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instruction set extensions to operate on multiple data at once. Commonly used for numerical applications such as video codecs, graphics rendering, and scientific computing, the use of SIMD techniques also aids in basic data processing tasks such as those implemented by libc functions. While other libc implementations already provide SIMD-enhanced variants of standard libc functions, the FreeBSD libc largely does not. The objective of the project completed by Robert Clausecker was to provide such SIMD-enhanced versions of relevant libc library functions and thus improve the performance of software linked against it. As these libc functions are used by most software available for FreeBSD, these enhancements give a broad benefit for a wide range of programs. You can read more information about the project in Robert’s recent blog post.

Naman Sood was a FreeBSD Foundation summer intern. They began the internship by submitting improvements to one of the firewalls included with FreeBSD, pf. For example, they completed work started by Luiz Amaral to allow traffic for pfsync, pf’s state table synchronization interface, to be carried over IPv6. They also submitted work to implement RFC 4787 REQs 1 and 3 for pf full cone NAT. Full cone NAT means all requests from an internal IP/port are mapped to the same external IP/port, which allows certain devices like the Nintendo Switch to work behind pf running on FreeBSD. Naman also took on miscellaneous tasks, such as exploring how to extract tcp checkpoint and failover work from a project called VPS for FreeBSD started by Klaus P. Ohrhallinger and submitting bug fixes for pw(8) and du(1).

To conclude, our gratitude goes out to the developers mentioned here and to the broader development community. We would also like to thank all those entities, whether they are private companies, academic institutions, or another type of organization, for sponsoring FreeBSD development and infrastructure maintenance. We appreciate the efforts of bug reporters, speakers, and bloggers who are critical to making FreeBSD what it is. Finally, thank you to all those who donated to the Foundation in 2023; your support makes all this work possible. We look forward to another busy year in 2024.

Advocating for FreeBSD is a key part of the Foundation’s mission. We want to make sure FreeBSD is always part of the operating system conversation. We want to help folks get started and ensure that commercial and academic users are aware of FreeBSD as a solution for their IT stack, products, and research.  We want to keep the community informed on the important and interesting FreeBSD work, and ensure that companies using FreeBSD have a place to be heard among developers. That is why we spend time talking about advocacy, and why we want you to be aware of our efforts.  Please take a minute to review FreeBSD Advocacy in 2023.

We were excited to get back to attending and sponsoring in-person events on a regular basis. We made our first appearance at the State of Open Conference in February and at Fossy in July. At Fossy, we led a FreeBSD workshop and gave a talk as part of the community track. The talk focused on how FreeBSD has managed to endure and thrive for over 30 years. Overall, we were able to sponsor, present and organize 16 events in 2023 including the in-person June 2023 FreeBSD Developer Summit and the November 2023 FreeBSD Vendor Summit. Videos from the Summits can be found on the Project’s YouTube channel. Trip reports can be found here. 

We have continued to expand our collection of how-to guides to help folks get started using FreeBSD. The new guides include a quick-start guide to binary package management on FreeBSD, a comprehensive introduction to the Z File System (ZFS) and some of its features, using VirtualBox to host virtual machines on FreeBSD, and a guide to setting up and configuring Packet Filter. Guides that had been made obsolete due to updates were also brought up to date.

 One of our goals for 2023 was to expand the coverage of FreeBSD in the media. We partnered with a PR firm earlier in the year to help us highlight the importance of FreeBSD in the open source landscape, the 30th Anniversary, and how companies are using FreeBSD with great success. Some of the 2023 coverage includes:

We also continued to highlight the work the Foundation software development team and members of the community have been doing to support the Project, via the Foundation. Blogs such as A Sneak Peek: SIMD-Enhanced String Functions for AMD64 and, of course, the Software Development Project Updates like this one: July 2023 Software Development Projects Update help keep you in the know about what we’re working on.  We also shared interesting FreeBSD related work done by the community at large such as FreeBSD for Research: CHERI/Morello and Why FreeBSD: Metify to Showcase How Moving to FreeBSD Enhanced Two New Products.

Whether through Google Summer of Code, the University of Waterloo co-op program, or just through the Foundation itself, we introduced you to many of the students working with the Project and Foundation over the past year.  Be sure to check out the blog or newsletter to learn more about their experiences with FreeBSD. Working with students was a priority for the Foundation this year, and it will be an even bigger focus in 2024.   

We also provided conference trip reports, tips on connecting with the community, and announcements about new initiatives like the SSDF Attestation. You’ll hear more about the latter from our new Director of Partnerships and Research, Greg Wallace. 

It’s safe to say, we covered a lot of areas in 2023, and we hope you’ll take the time to check out all the latest updates you may have missed.

June 19, 2023 marked the 30th Birthday of FreeBSD and we had such fun celebrating with the community. The celebration kicked off at the June FreeBSD Developer’s Summit with a 30th birthday FreeBSD Timeline cake, special swag, commemorative t-shirt,  and the printed 30th birthday issue of the FreeBSD Journal. Starting the week of FreeBSD Day (June 19th), we began highlighting the features of FreeBSD. Some of the articles included: 

We’re also very proud to say that you can still access the FreeBSD Journal for Free. Recently, we’ve also transitioned to offering each article in HTML format. By transitioning to the HTML format, we can now bring all the informative articles to the community in multiple ways. We can also more easily promote individual articles for greater visibility and track the views to get a pulse on what the community finds interesting and valuable. Being able to provide this kind of FreeBSD information, at no cost to the reader, is just one of the ways we’re continuing to advocate for the Project. If you haven’t read it yet, please take a look and share with your friends and colleagues. 

Both the FreeBSD Newsletter and the Project’s Quarterly Status Reports are an excellent way to find out about upcoming grant and CFP submission deadlines, get ongoing updates from our software development team, and find out more about where we’re going and where we’ve been to promote FreeBSD around the world. Our newsletters are back to a monthly cadence, and, this year we showcased a different focus area of the Foundation for most of the year.  If you haven’t yet signed up to receive the newsletter from us, please do so at the bottom of this page.  Check out past issues of the newsletter and our quarterly status reports for 2023.

This year we continued to expand our presence on social media, increasing the number of articles and technical content that we shared. We also created a Mastodon profile to reach a new audience. As an advocacy tool, social networks are key in building awareness for the project, as well as connecting with our most valuable resource, the community. Continuing to build a dialog with the community remained a focus in 2023.

The expanded social media presence led to nearly 1 million post impressions in 2023, growing global awareness of FreeBSD. Engagement on these posts also increased by 38% from 2022. Not only did we promote more FreeBSD content, but the community was more engaged with the content we shared. Even with multiple social networks losing large portions of their user base in 2023, we continued to steadily grow our followers, more than doubling our new follower rate from 2022. 

We’re excited to continue improving our social media presence in 2024, focusing on promoting technical content. We hope that social media can continue to provide a glimpse into our work to support the community. In order to better serve the project, offering high-quality content to the global FreeBSD community remains one of our main priorities. Follow us on social media to keep up with the latest in FreeBSD and our work to support the project.

In collaboration with the FreeBSD Core team, we recently launched the FreeBSD 2024 Community Survey. The purpose of this survey is to collect quantitative data from the public in order to help guide the Project’s priorities and efforts.  It will remain open for only a limited time so we encourage you to participate promptly. Your feedback is very important to us. Thank you for your help!

As you can see, the Foundation advocacy team had a very productive 2023. We were able to accomplish so much this year, in part, because of the financial support from the FreeBSD community. Your commitment to the Project is truly inspiring. Thank you for your investment into the success of FreeBSD and if you’re able, please consider making a donation today. We can’t do this without you!

— Contributed by Anne Dickison and Drew Gurkowski

The FreeBSD community is proud to herald the release of FreeBSD 14. FreeBSD 14 represents the 82nd release in the history of one of the world’s first open source projects, and contains over two and a half years of development work since the launch of the previous release. FreeBSD is the engine behind some of the world’s most well-known and widely used systems and brands including Sony Playstation, NetApp, Juniper, NetScaler, Netflix, and Netgate. With support until at least November 30th, 2028 for the FreeBSD 14.x series of releases, FreeBSD 14 continues FreeBSD’s legacy of creating an exceptionally stable, secure, and performance-oriented operating system. FreeBSD 14 brings further security and performance enhancements, along with extended support and interoperability. In this blog, we’ll take a look at these key themes to outline what’s new in FreeBSD 14, and more importantly, why it matters.

FreeBSD has a long legacy of being a secure and stable open source operating system. FreeBSD’s developers continue to work on, and prioritize, security with the intention of creating the most secure version of FreeBSD possible. FreeBSD 14 provides increased security in multiple areas, including Capsicum sandboxing, authentication, the removal of unnecessary services, and more. It is important to note that some security updates announced for the release of FreeBSD 14 have been incorporated into existing 13.x releases in order to ensure their enterprise-level stability and readiness before their formal introduction in FreeBSD 14.

Capsicum is a lightweight operating system capability and sandboxing framework that was initially developed by University of Cambridge with grants from Google, DARPA, and The FreeBSD Foundation. Capsicum stands out as a framework that allows developers to create programs that operate within a safe sandbox environment that is separate and isolated from the rest of their environment. The prototype for Capsicum was developed during the FreeBSD 8.x releases and Capsicum has continued to see improvements in FreeBSD ever since. For example, FreeBSD 14 brings sockstat(1) to Capscum sandboxing. Sockstat(1) is a versatile utility that displays open sockets within FreeBSD. The sockstat(1) utility can be used for a wide range of use cases, including – but certainly not limited to – troubleshooting.

FreeBSD 14 also provides further measures to prevent return-oriented programming attacks. A return-oriented-programming attack (ROP) is a technique that allows attackers to execute code in their target system by gaining control of a system’s call stack. Mature open source projects, like FreeBSD, have numerous developers throughout the world, making further iteration inherent. FreeBSD 14 represents a continuation of existing security measures in this area by enabling position independent executable and address space layout randomization by default for 64-bit architectures.

Lastly, FreeBSD 14 provides updates in cryptography and email, making FreeBSD 14 ideal for highly regulated industries and government. FreeBSD 14 includes support for FIDO/U2F hardware authenticators. FIDO/U2F is an open authentication standard, overseen by the FIDO Alliance, that was created by Google, Yubico, and NXP Semiconductors, with the vision of making a secure public key cryptography system. Aside from support for FIDO/U2F, FreeBSD 14 introduces a more secure, lightweight, and performance-driven default mail transport agent in Dragonfly Mail Agent. Dragonfly Mail Agent provides the maximum security possible in the smallest footprint for users who would like to set their own balance between security, performance, and load-management.

FreeBSD is known for many other things besides security, and high-performance is one of them. In fact, Netflix has done numerous talks about the kind of cutting-edge networking throughput they’re seeing. But it’s not just Netflix that benefits from FreeBSD’s high-performance capabilities. Companies like Simpro and Deepstack have given talks about how they have benefitted from FreeBSD’s performance capabilities. FreeBSD 14 provides additional performance enhancements that can lead to less downtime and helps FreeBSD take the lead in the world of serverless computing.

FreeBSD 14 now reboots even faster than before. To be precise, FreeBSD can now boot in only 25 milliseconds. This massive performance improvement makes FreeBSD 14 an ideal choice for microVMs. FreeBSD 14 also lays the groundwork for further compatibility with Firecracker Virtual Machine Monitor. Although much of the groundwork laid in FreeBSD 14 to optimize for serverless computing is in the background and not in user experience, a faster reboot time is noticeable, and further work is ongoing in the area of serverless computing. Stay tuned!

FreeBSD 14 focuses heavily on support and interoperability with other systems including Linux and major cloud providers. Let’s face it, a hallmark of open source technology is the freedom and ability to choose software depending on what’s right for a user’s specific situation and FreeBSD is adding to that hallmark with FreeBSD 14.

New efforts to enhance interoperability with Linux represent an interesting shift in direction for FreeBSD. FreeBSD 14 makes it easier for users to port applications and programs from Linux to FreeBSD, or vice versa. In this area, a number of utilities have been added to FreeBSD 14, including an nproc(1) utility, compatible with the Linux program of the same name, native timerfd(2) facility to enable porting of Linux programs that use timerfd, and a netlink(4) utility for further compatibility with Linux. 

Lastly in the theme of support and interoperability, FreeBSD 14 includes support for servers with greater CPU space on amd64 and arm64, up to 1024 cores, making FreeBSD an ideal choice for high-performance computing scenarios where systems are running large data-heavy applications. FreeBSD 14 provides further support for users of major cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud. FreeBSD brings optimized networking support for Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, ensuring that all three top cloud providers now have enhanced networking support in FreeBSD. FreeBSD 14 also brings a superior filesystem in the form of ZFS for use on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. FreeBSD users with arm64 and amd64 architectures are also now supported on all Azure VM types. 

Altogether, FreeBSD 14 includes countless new features supported by The FreeBSD Foundation, and represents a strong step forward for the FreeBSD Project. The release of FreeBSD 14 includes both iterative improvements, like support for OpenSSL 3.0.12, and innovations like an astoundingly fast reboot time along with further optimization for a serverless future. If you’re not currently familiar with FreeBSD and you’re interested in serverless computing, high-performance computing, or even a stable and secure operating system, now might be a good time to start looking into FreeBSD. To get started, visit FreeBSD.org or Download FreeBSD 14.

Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself and where you are in your education journey?
I am Raghav Sharma, an undergraduate student in India pursuing a Bachelor of Technology in Electronics Engineering. I am currently in my final year of B.Tech. The areas that capture my interest are systems programming, kernel development, compilers, and backend projects.

Q: Have you ever worked with Google Summer of Code before?
Yes. I worked with Google Summer of Code 2022 with the Haiku organization for porting the XFS file system driver to the HaikuOS project.

Q: Why did you want to work with FreeBSD?
The FreeBSD project is an excellent opportunity for me to delve more into systems programming and kernel development. There are lots of amazing projects where community is working and I wanted to explore those ideas.

Q: Please tell us a little about your Google Summer of Code project?
The goal of my project is to add SquashFS driver support to the FreeBSD kernel. SquashFS is the read-only file system that lets you compress whole file systems or single directories, write them to other devices/partitions or to ordinary files and then mount them directly. There exists two implementations for SquashFS one is a Linux kernel driver and the second one is a SquashFuse project. I used both of these implementations to port the driver to our FreeBSD kernel. Since we are almost at the end of Summer of Code, I finished driver implementation. We now support mount(8), directories, files, and symlinks for SquashFS.

Q: What have you learned from this experience so far?
My learning experience so far is :

Q: How has working with the FreeBSD Project been?
So far it’s very amazing. Thanks to mentor Chuck Tuffli to help me get started on everything like setting up a development environment, guiding me to necessary docs for SquashFS implementation, etc.
The community is also pretty nice and active as well.

Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself and where you are in your education journey.

I’m Soobin Rho, and this will be my third year attending Augustana University, which is located in South Dakota. I’ll be graduating in 2025. I study philosophy, math, and computer science.

Born in South Korea, but raised in Dubai, I came to US a few years ago to attend college. My goal is to work in a great, mission-driven company during the day, and spend my free time doing stuff I truly care about, such as open-source projects for the environment and sustainability.

Q: Have you ever worked with Google Summer of Code before? 

No, GSoC 2023 is my first. I read about GSoC first on Hacker News. One of the comments said FreeBSD is one of the participating open-source projects. So, I applied. I chose my project from FreeBSD wiki’s GSoC project ideas list.

Q: Why did you want to work with FreeBSD? 

I tried a lot of operating systems, which I’m not going to name, and alongside with a lot of desktop environments. At the end, however, at least for now, I’ve decided that my favorite coding environment is FreeBSD with vim and tmux without any desktop environment with just the terminal.

Of course, I resort back to other operating systems from time to time whenever I need to do stuff with GUI. Nonetheless, it just feels right. I’m doing all of my dev stuff through FreeBSD. Joining GSoC 2023 was my first time contributing to FreeBSD, but I also intend to stay as a contributor and keep maintaining the mfsBSD integration.

Q: Please tell us a little about your Google Summer of Code project.

Speaking of mfsBSD, which was created in 2007 by Matuska, mfs stands for memory file system. Basically, once you install mfsBSD into a system and boot into it, all of the operating system is now running under a memory file system. What this means is that you can do a lot of stuff now, such as recovery operations and system diagnostics. Especially, my favorite use case for mfsBSD is for one of my laptops with just one drive. I can boot mfsBSD in the drive and then install FreeBSD on the exact drive that I installed mfsBSD at. Since every file in mfsBSD was moved and loaded to the memory file system, the original drive can be even deleted and overwritten with a completely new FreeBSD instance using `bsdinstall` from mfsBSD.

My project integrates mfsBSD into the FreeBSD release tool set, such that mfsBSD images (.img for disc and .iso for opticals) will now be available at the FreeBSD homepage¹.

Q: What have you learned from this experience so far? 

I didn’t know anything about MAKE(1) before taking on this project. Reading `/usr/src/Makefile` and `/usr/src/release/Makefile` helped me a lot. Also, it was extremely valuable to read `/usr/src/release/Makefile.vm`, and in fact, a lot of my code is based on these makefiles.

Q: How has working with the FreeBSD Project been?

Fun and exciting! It was fun to have a weekly meeting with my mentors, Joseph Mingrone and Juraj Lutter. It was exciting to see my code producing mfsBSD images I can use myself, as well as for a lot of others whoever needs them.