7 Future Directions

It is imperative for our release engineering activities to scale with our growing userbase. Along these lines we are working very hard to document the procedures involved in producing FreeBSD releases.

• Parallelism - Certain portions of the release build are actually “embarrassingly parallel”. Most of the tasks are very I/O intensive, so having multiple high-speed disk drives is actually more important than using multiple processors in speeding up the make release process. If multiple disks are used for different hierarchies in the chroot(2) environment, then the CVS checkout of the ports and doc trees can be happening simultaneously as the make world on another disk. Using a RAID solution (hardware or software) can significantly decrease the overall build time.

• Cross-building releases - Building IA-64 or Alpha release on x86 hardware? make TARGET=ia64 release.

• Regression Testing - We need better automated correctness testing for FreeBSD.

• Installation Tools - Our installation program has long since outlived its intended life span. Several projects are under development to provide a more advanced installation mechanism. The libh project[5] was one such project that aimed to provide an intelligent new package framework and GUI installation program.