Daemonless

Supply chain security in modern container ecosystems is often treated as a post-build afterthought: a secondary scanner runs against a finished image and tries to infer what packages are inside. When building native FreeBSD OCI images at Daemonless, we decided to make supply chain transparency a first-class citizen from day one. With recent updates to our custom build system (dbuild), every container image generated across our entire fleet now produces multi-format Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) artifacts directly at build time. ...

When you run FreeBSD in a homelab across multiple servers, VNET jails, or VMs, routine maintenance quickly reveals a hidden inefficiency. Every time you provision a new jail or update your fleet, each instance independently connects to public pkg.FreeBSD.org mirrors to download identical packages. If you have a dozen jails running services that need Python, SQLite, or FFmpeg, your WAN connection downloads the exact same binary archives a dozen times. ...

When the mission is to build native FreeBSD OCI images that run in Jails without a heavy background daemon on the host, the project name basically writes itself: daemonless.io. The goal is simplicity, transparency, and architectural purity. So, it is only natural that the very first thing we did was install a suite of tools designed specifically to manage, supervise, and run… daemons. It is a bit like starting a “Car-Free” lifestyle and then immediately buying a fleet of high-end electric scooters. Technically, the name still holds up, but you’re still getting around on wheels. We might be “daemonless” on the host, but inside the container, we’ve hired the most efficient, C-based babysitter in the business. ...

I’ve been a FreeBSD user since the late 90s. From 2002 to 2010, I was a ports committer working on the GNOME and Multimedia teams. I have always felt more “at home” with FreeBSD. There is a logic and cohesiveness to the Base System + Ports approach that just clicks for me in a way Linux distros often don’t. But the world changed. The OCI (Docker) container workflow took over, and for good reason: immutable infrastructure and easy updates are incredible for sanity. ...