Porting the Vector Packet Processing (VPP) framework to FreeBSD to enhance network performance capabilities.

The Vector Packet Processing (VPP) project on FreeBSD aimed to port VPP, an open-source, high-performance user space networking stack, to FreeBSD. VPP optimizes packet processing through vectorized operations and parallelism, ideal for software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) applications. Initiated in November 2023, this effort was led by Tom Jones, a FreeBSD developer specializing in network performance, under a contract with the FreeBSD Foundation.

Improving the Continuous Integration (CI) infrastructure to ensure more reliable and efficient software development and testing processes.

Key achievements include upgrading disk and memory for test VMs using parts from decommissioned machines, updating the build environment for stable/13 jobs to 13.3-RELEASE, and transitioning the i386 build on the main branch to use cross-build on amd64.

Ongoing efforts involve merging critical reviews, adding new hardware to the CI cluster, and designing a pre-commit CI system and pull/merge-request system. The team is also working on utilizing the CI cluster for building release artifacts, simplifying CI/test environment setup, and redesigning the hardware test lab.

Enhancing support for cloud-init, making FreeBSD a Tier I platform to improve its integration and usability in cloud environments.

Cloud-init is now the standard for setting up servers in the cloud. Over the past year and a half, FreeBSD has significantly improved its support for cloud-init. Working closely with the cloud-init developers and the FreeBSD Foundation, this year's focus has been on enhancing FreeBSD to enable the cloud-init team to directly test future changes to FreeBSD code paths.