This project builds the FreeBSD VM image for the cross-platform-actions/action GitHub action. The image contains a standard FreeBSD installation without any expectations of running X.

In addition to standard installation, the following packages are installed as well:

• sudo
• bash
• curl

Except for the root user, there's one additional user, runner, which is the user that will be running the commands in the GitHub action. This user is allowed use sudo without a password.

The following architectures and versions are supported:

• Packer 1.9.1 or later
• QEMU

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/freebsd-builder
   cd freebsd-builder
   

2. Run build.sh to build the image:

   ./build.sh <version> <architecture>
   

   Where <version> and <architecture> are the any of the versions or architectures available in the above table.

The above command will build the VM image and the resulting disk image will be at the path: output/freebsd-<version>-<architecture>.qcow2.

At startup, the image will look for a second hard drive. If present and it contains a file named keys at the root, it will install this file as the authorized_keys file for the runner user. The disk is expected to be formatted as FAT32. This is used as an alternative to a shared folder between the host and the guest, since this is not supported by the xhyve hypervisor. FAT32 is chosen because it's the only filesystem that is supported by both the host (macOS) and the guest (FreeBSD) out of the box.

The disk needs to be configured with the GPT partitioning scheme. The VM needs to be configured to use UEFI. This is required for the VM image to be able to run using the xhyve hypervisor.

The qcow2 format is chosen because unused space doesn't take up any space on disk, it's compressible and easily converts the raw format, used by xhyve.