So after a couple of comments from readers (what? you mean I’m not just screaming into the void?), I decided to investigate building the latest version of FreeNAS with Xen support.

Since my original post about building FreeNAS 9.2 for Xen, the FreeNAS developers released 9.2.1 which added some cool stuff like Samba 4, newer LSI HBA drivers and new zfs features.  After invesigating the upgrades available, it was pretty clear that if I wanted to run the new version, I needed to build the newest version, or at least build the upgrade files for it to upgrade my existing installation.  For the curious, here’s a list of the changes in 9.2.1:

http://www.freenas.org/whats-new/page/4

The build process is largely the same as before – there’s one small step added as this is a point-release of 9.2, so the steps are abbreviated a lot.  For a more full explanation, see my original post.

Fire up your build environment of FreeBSD 9.2 that you used for the original build.  If you don’t have one, do a fresh install including ports and all the development stuff.

Here’s what I did to build this latest set:

cd /home && rm -rf freenas
git clone -b 9.2.1.5-RELEASE git://github.com/freenas/freenas.git
cd freenas
make git-external
make checkout
make release

Then just wait about 10 hours (seriously – it took that long using 3 cores of my Xeon and 8G of memory), and make sure you have around 35gigs of free space in your build environment.

The fruits of my labours can be found for download in this other post of mine.

Ooroo!