But how long on average does it take to boot in wall clock time?
“FreeBSD/Firecracker now boots to a login prompt in 782 ms. 170 ms of this is spent generating a self-signed TLS certificate for sendmail, because of course it is.”
On the gripping hand, it's mad that it's still Sendmail, although that is going to change. It's 2023, and the fact that a FreeBSD system still has the traditional ~2000 lines of indistinguishable-from-line-noise "DO NOT EDIT THIS" stuff in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf, complete with whole bunches of rules for UUCP, is rather amazing.
I wonder how many small FreeBSD systems out there are spending their time double-bouncing cron-job mail that cannot be delivered. (-:
I suspect Firecracker is set up to be as quick to initialize as possible, but still that a vanilla (ie not an optimized fork) can do that ... My phone takes a two orders of magnitude more!
I hope your BSDCan talk is getting recorded.