2023 in Review: Continuous Integration and Workflow Improvement

As part of our continued support of the FreeBSD Project, we have a full-time staff member dedicated to improving the Project’s continuous integration system and the test infrastructure. In 2023, we added more testing jobs for ARM64 architectures like testing with Kernel Address Sanitizer and building test for non-standard compilers like GCC 12 and 13.

We have also made great progress running the workflow working group, designing and implementing systems to support the pull-request based workflow. Pre-commit CI is on the horizon as well.

We worked with a summer intern to update the “Tinderbox View” (https://tinderbox.freebsd.org) of the CI result dashboard. It now provides more details of the test results and the possible breakage point.

The Foundation also supports our full-time staff member’s efforts to work with the engineers from Microsoft to help them implement support for new features in Azure and provide more FreeBSD features in Azure. This includes ARM64 VM support, Gen2 VM support and ZFS images provided. All these changes are included in 14.0-RELEASE and published to the Azure Marketplace.

As always, the Foundation’s support of CI and Microsoft Cloud environments is only possible because of your investment in FreeBSD. If you have not yet done so, please consider supporting FreeBSD before the year-end.