FreeBSD Release Cycle - 2022-09-08

Today I wanted to run some tests with jails and while jumping through the amazing FreeBSD handbook I found some information that you can script the installation of FreeBSD inside of a jail via the bsdinstall command.

To script the installation of a FreeBSD server (not a jail) you can make use of bsdinstall script. Sadly this doesn’t work for jails, because bsdinstall script wants to configure disks and other things that aren’t necessary and/or available in jails.

The correct command would be bsdinstall jail, which up until now does not support any scripting. A PR for this feature is already merged into current, but has not yet landed anywhere else.

It took me quite a while to figure out why this change from over a year ago is not yet available on the FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE machines I have running.

Turns out a quick look into the handbook would’ve explained it.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/#updating-src-obtaining-src

What is named current is the “bleeding-edge” release channel of FreeBSD. It corresponds with the main branch of the freebsd-src repository.

The next best thing is the stable/X branch (where the change also hasn’t been seen yet 😢) and finally there is the releng/X.Y branch which holds everything that is part of the OS I’m currently running.

Long story short: It will probably take quite some time until this patch is available in a FreeBSD RELEASE version.