CFT: FreeBSD Package Base

[David Chisnall]

On 29/04/2019 14:19, Lev Serebryakov wrote:
>   I'm not very interested in packetized base for "big servers" which
> contains full FreeBSd installation

'Big servers' may have a full FreeBSD installation in the base system, 
but they may also have hundreds of jails that want the absolute minimum 
required for the service that they're exporting.

FreeBSD is currently suffering quite a lot from the lack of any solid 
story here.  The vast majority of cloud deployments are now using some 
combination of Docker and Kubernetes or equivalents to spin up a large 
number of VMs and an even larger number of microservice containers 
within them.  This should be something that FreeBSD is ideal for - jails 
preform better and provide a more coherent interface than the mess of 
cgroups and seccomp-bpf that Linux containers use.

It *ought* to be trivial to create a jail that has basically nothing 
other than the core libraries (and maybe a shell) and is managed from 
the outside.  Even the few FreeBSD core utilities that support jails 
don't really work like this (for example, I can use pkg to install 
something in a jail, but doing so implicitly installs a copy of the pkg 
tool inside the jail and invokes that).

David