Ed MasteDigitalOcean: You haven't used our services in a while... "no matter what roadblock lies in your way, we’re here to help."
Me: My roadblock is that you stopped offering #FreeBSD images.
DigitalOcean: You can bring your own image!
Me: BYO images require ext3/ext4, which are not native FreeBSD filesystems.
Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) 
@emaste Why doesn't FreeBSD support it?
@Conan_Kudo The FreeBSD kernel does support ext3/ext4, but we have no tooling to build VM images on an ext3/ext4 filesystem, I'm not sure it's been tested as a root fs, the loader most likely doesn't support it, etc.
@emaste I assume it could be tested and made to work. DigitalOcean isn't the only provider with restrictions like this. It may be useful to do consider supporting it properly in FreeBSD...
Autolycus 🏴☠️@Conan_Kudo @emaste The only benefit of supporting ext in FreeBSD that I can see is mounting drives. It would be silly to use it for the root fs.
Scott Williams 🐧@autolycus @Conan_Kudo @emaste Back when I ran FreeBSD, the issue was that ext3/4 are GPL and not license compatible with the FreeBSD kernel, which to your point, is why there is limited mount support but not kernel level rootfs support. At the time at least, Linux wasn't great at ufs support either. Getting FreeBSD and Linux to directly share files was much more annoying than I expected it would be.
@vwbusguy @autolycus @Conan_Kudo #FreeBSD includes a BSD licensed ext2/3/4 implementation and there's no fundamental reason an ext3/4 rootfs is impossible.
@emaste @autolycus @Conan_Kudo Yeah, but last I checked it was very basic and didn't support journaling. Let me put it another way to illustrate the point: Why isn't zfs in the Linux kernel?