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Comment by pestaa | Hacker News Reader

From the FreeBSD product page[1]:

    Please note that for technical reasons this AMI
    only runs on high-performance (cluster & high-I/O) 
    instances.

Looking at Mr. Percival's other resources, other contributed AMIs don't run on arbitrary instances, either.

Being a broke student, I wanted to put it on the smallest micro instance. What are these technical reasons that prevent me from doing so?

In any case, thanks for the great work.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00AA25MLK/ref=sp_mpg_...

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You can run FreeBSD on all instance types, but some of them (everything except cluster, high-I/O, and the new m3 instances) need to have FreeBSD pretending to be Windows -- meaning that you have to pay the higher rate for the Windows license.

I don't think Amazon wants to "officially" support a route which involves people paying for a Windows license they're not using, but the route does exist.

I believe it's because the "normal". EC2 instances are paravirtualised through Xen, whereas the types listed are hardware virtualisation. Not sure though.

Used to be that only the Windows instances were HVM (thus the defenestration hack using them to get FreeBSD onto AWS) and all the Unix ones used paravirtualization - has this changed?

I think cluster instances are always HVM, not sure about high IO.

Cluster, high-I/O, and M3 all have HVM available. Basically, all the new instance types released since I started complaining to EC2 engineers about how HVM is so much easier to work with than PV... ;-)

Ah, so we could've had FreeBSD by coughing up the cash for one of those - or was there any special porting needed for it?

Porting was needed, but I've done it for you.

In my past experience, the micro instances are slower than molasses when it comes to the ports system. All the initial install/verification sucks a lot of CPU and the micro's can't handle it.

When I set up new micro instances, I usually launch them as c1.medium to set things up, then stop and restart them as t1.micro -- EC2's ability to change instance types is very useful here!

I had no idea that this was possible. Great strategy that I will add to my bag of tricks.

What are you trying to run? Even EC2 micro instances are not all that cheap, if you just want a VPS to tinker with.

I have several low-traffic sites already on a cheap FreeBSD VPS with 128Mb RAM and looked for alternatives that are more mainstream.

Paying for Windows-like licenses puts EC2 out of the question, though.

What does "mainstream" buy you?

New Rackspace Cloud (pretty mainstream, right?) lists FreeBSD 9 as one of the supported OSes: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/servers/techdetails/

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