Support for the FreeBSD operating system - Elastic Compute Service

FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system that features advanced networking and high performance, security, and compatibility. This topic describes the compatibility of various versions of the FreeBSD operating system with Alibaba Cloud platforms. This topic also describes how to upgrade FreeBSD across major releases.

Support for the setting or changing of passwords or key pairs in the Elastic Compute Service (ECS) console by different versions of FreeBSD

Version	Image ID	Setting of passwords during instance creation	Setting of key pairs during instance creation	Changing of passwords in the ECS console	Changing of key pairs in the ECS console
FreeBSD 13.0	freebsd_13_0_x86_30G_alibase_20220324.vhd	Not supported	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
FreeBSD 12.3	freebsd_12_3_x64_30G_alibase_20220331.vhd	Not supported	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
FreeBSD 12.1	freebsd_12_1_x64_30G_alibase_20201022.vhd	Not supported	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
FreeBSD 11.4	freebsd_11_4_x64_30G_alibase_20210319.vhd	Supported	Supported	Supported	Supported
FreeBSD 11.3	freebsd_11_3_x64_30G_alibase_20200803.vhd	Supported	Supported	Supported	Supported
FreeBSD 11.2	freebsd_11_02_64_30G_alibase_20190806.vhd	Supported	Supported	Supported	Supported

The following section provides examples on support for the setting or changing of passwords or key pairs in the ECS console by different versions of FreeBSD.

FreeBSD 11.4

This version supports the setting of passwords or key pairs during instance creation.
This version supports the changing of passwords after instance creation.

FreeBSD 13.0

This version supports the setting of key pairs during instance creation. You cannot set a password when you create an instance that runs this FreeBSD version.
This version does not support the changing of key pairs after instance creation.

FreeBSD 11 and 12

If you want to run FreeBSD 11 or 12 on a fifth-generation or later ECS instance, you must install the required kernel patches in the operating system. Otherwise, the system disk cannot be found and the system cannot start as expected. The required kernel patches are installed in Alibaba Cloud FreeBSD public images to meet the startup requirements of fifth-generation or later instance families. You can call the DescribeInstanceTypeFamilies operation and configure the Generation parameter to query fifth-generation or later instance families.

You can use FreeBSD kernel source code to install kernel patches and compile the kernel to resolve and prevent instance startup failures in the following scenarios:

If you use a FreeBSD image that is not provided by Alibaba Cloud or a custom image that is derived from the FreeBSD image to create an instance of a fifth-generation or later instance family, the instance may fail to start.
If you use a FreeBSD public image to create an instance of a fifth-generation or later instance family and use the freebsd-update command to update the kernel with new patches, the instance may fail to start.
Note
You can use the freebsd-update command to update the kernel version to a kernel version of FreeBSD 13. For more information, see the "Upgrade FreeBSD across major releases" section of this topic.

The following example shows how to install patches and compile kernels on FreeBSD by compiling the source code of FreeBSD 12.4:

Download and decompress the FreeBSD kernel source code package.

wget https://mirrors.aliyun.com/freebsd/releases/amd64/12.4-RELEASE/src.txz -O /src.txz
cd /
tar -zxvf /src.txz

Download patches.

In this example, 0001-virtio.patch for the virtio driver is downloaded.

cd /usr/src/sys/dev/virtio/
wget https://ecs-image-tools.oss-cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/0001-virtio.patch
patch -p4 < 0001-virtio.patch

Copy the kernel files and compile and install the kernel.
N in the make -j<N> command specifies the number of jobs that run in parallel. Specify N based on your compiling environment. For example, for a single-vCPU environment, we recommend that you set -j<N> to -j2.The ratio of the number of vCPUs to the value of N is 1:2.
```
cd /usr/src/
cp ./sys/amd64/conf/GENERIC .
make -j2 buildworld KERNCONF=GENERIC
make -j2 buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC
make -j2 installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC
```
Delete the source code after you compile the kernel.
```
rm -rf /usr/src/*
rm -rf /usr/src/.*
```

FreeBSD 13

You do not need to install kernel patches on FreeBSD 13 or later. FreeBSD 13 includes the following kernel patches that are required by fifth-generation or later ECS instances:

Before FreeBSD 13 can run as expected, you must run the following command to add the kern.maxphys kernel parameter and set the parameter to 65536:

echo "kern.maxphys=65536" >>/boot/loader.conf

The kernel version of FreeBSD 13 that is provided by Alibaba Cloud is 13.0-Release-p8, which is a ready-to-use version that includes more than two patches and is configured with the required kernel parameters.

Upgrade FreeBSD across major releases

This section describes how to upgrade FreeBSD across major releases. In this example, FreeBSD is upgraded from 12.3 to 13.1.

Run the following internal upgrade command:
```
freebsd-update upgrade -r 13.1-RELEASE
```

Expected output:

Run the following installation command as prompted:
```
/usr/sbin/freebsd-update install
```

Expected output:

Run the following command to configure the loader.conf file:
```
echo "kern.maxphys=65536" >>/boot/loader.conf
```
Run the following command to restart the instance:
Warning
The restart operation stops the instance for a short period of time and may interrupt services that are running on the instance. We recommend that you restart the instance during off-peak hours.
```
reboot
```
Run the following command to check the FreeBSD version:
```
uname -r
```

If the following information is returned, FreeBSD is upgraded to 13.1.

image..png

References

For more information about FreeBSD, see About FreeBSD.