updating the FreeBSD syzbot instance

[Mark Johnston]

Hi,

We've had a FreeBSD syzbot instance running since 2019[1], and since
then as far as I know it's been running the same version of FreeBSD. It
continuously builds new FreeBSD kernels from the development branch.

This depends on the ability to build new kernels from this old host.
I've kept it working but it's hard to justify adding complexity to our
build system to support building from EOL releases. Most recently we
have a failure that looks non-trivial to work around[2], so I wonder if
it'd be possible to upgrade or rebuild the FreeBSD host using a modern
release (15.0 seems ideal).

I'd be available to help with that any way I can. Many thanks for all
of the support over all these years.

-Mark

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/syzkaller/c/jDqMTOc8DxY/m/jYczBjWcCQAJ
[2] https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=299e226573beab6dce8498c4cd904ad63da70d57

[Dmitry Vyukov]

Hi Mark,

I see that the 15 images are provided by freebsd-org-cloud-dev, so it
should be possible.
Can you suggest a concrete image from these?

But we would need to recap how to administer freebsd %)

$ gcloud compute images list --project=freebsd-org-cloud-dev | grep freebsd-15
freebsd-15-0-release-amd64-ufs
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-ufs
READY
freebsd-15-0-release-amd64-zfs
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-zfs
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-ufs-20251120
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-ufs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-ufs-20251127
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-ufs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-ufs-20251204
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-ufs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-ufs-20251211
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-ufs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-ufs-20251218
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-ufs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-ufs-20251227
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-ufs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-ufs-20260102
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-ufs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-ufs-20260108
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-ufs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-zfs-20251120
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-zfs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-zfs-20251127
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-zfs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-zfs-20251204
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-zfs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-zfs-20251211
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-zfs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-zfs-20251218
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-zfs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-zfs-20251227
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-zfs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-zfs-20260102
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-zfs-snap
READY
freebsd-15-0-stable-amd64-zfs-20260108
freebsd-org-cloud-dev freebsd-15-0-amd64-zfs-snap
READY

[Mark Johnston]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 04:01:38PM +0100, 'Dmitry Vyukov' via syzkaller wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Jan 2026 at 15:50, Mark Johnston <ma...@freebsd.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > We've had a FreeBSD syzbot instance running since 2019[1], and since
> > then as far as I know it's been running the same version of FreeBSD. It
> > continuously builds new FreeBSD kernels from the development branch.
> >
> > This depends on the ability to build new kernels from this old host.
> > I've kept it working but it's hard to justify adding complexity to our
> > build system to support building from EOL releases. Most recently we
> > have a failure that looks non-trivial to work around[2], so I wonder if
> > it'd be possible to upgrade or rebuild the FreeBSD host using a modern
> > release (15.0 seems ideal).
> >
> > I'd be available to help with that any way I can. Many thanks for all
> > of the support over all these years.
> >
> > -Mark
> >
> > [1] https://groups.google.com/g/syzkaller/c/jDqMTOc8DxY/m/jYczBjWcCQAJ
> > [2] https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=299e226573beab6dce8498c4cd904ad63da70d57
>
> Hi Mark,
>
> I see that the 15 images are provided by freebsd-org-cloud-dev, so it
> should be possible.
> Can you suggest a concrete image from these?

freebsd-15-0-amd64-ufs is probably the best bet.

> But we would need to recap how to administer freebsd %)

I can certainly help with anything that comes up, but I'm not too
familiar with how the existing instance is configured. I'd hope that
you could mostly just copy over any existing configuration and
everything would just work.

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