#pkgbase

A bug in my Ansible connection plugin needed a real FreeBSD jail to reproduce. So I put three of them on an idle 512 MB free-tier VPS. With pkgbase, the base userland is just 33 MB. And persistent jails use zero idle processes. Here’s the build, the regression test, and the two sharp edges that cost me twenty minutes: https://blog.hofstede.it/three-test-jails-on-a-512-mb-free-tier-vps/ #FreeBSD #Ansible #pkgbase #SysAdmin #Devops

For my next trick, running mkjail upgrade -a to get the jails still on #FreeBSD 15.0 onto 15.1

mkjail will be greatly simplified under #pkgbase.

As of 11:59:45 UTC on Saturday July 18, 2026, all my hosts are running #FreeBSD 15.1 Every. Last. One. Of. Them. #pkgbase Such a fast & easy upgrade. Thank you.

The webserver for my websites (https://blog.hofstede.it and others) is now runing on 15.1-RELEASE arm64 with PKGBase 🙂

Upgrade from 15.0 to 15.1was pleasantly boring:

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/#pkgbase

• Creating a BE for the new version
• Mounting the BE to /mnt/upgrade
• Executing :env ABI=FreeBSD:15:aarch64 pkg-static -c /mnt/upgrade upgrade -r FreeBSD-base"
• bectl activate -t 15.0-RELEASE
• Rebooting the system

Everything working fine, all lights green

#freebsd #unix #selfhosting #arm64