I think one of the main reasons I've directed energy elsewhere is because there's a (from my perception) thick metawork process to get real work done. Culture shock, mostly. Almost all of the tools and methods are different from my own. My experience at Google has given me good practice in dealing with systems foreign to me, so why do I hesitate to work on FreeBSD stuff?

Outside of the processes involved in getting code into the FreeBSD source tree, one of the main problems I've had working on specifically kernel changes in FreeBSD are that I haven't come up with a good solution for separating workspaces other than simply creating a new virtual machine for each logical workspace. In Perforce, you can create multiple clients and work on independent changes in each client. In userland code, you can simply just build a new binary in a different directory, and you can test both binaries independently.

With kernels, I have a hard time multitasking. Not specifically multitasking different kernels, but if I'm making kernel and userland changes which are unrelated to eachother, I can't safely test a new kernel on the same system as a userland change. Isolating these as easy as making a new virtual machine, but copying virtual machines is not as fast and easy as, say, making a new perforce client.

I haven't come up with a good solution yet, but I'm sure someone else has and perhaps I'll build on that. Maybe some kind of hack where I would use a pristine, read only system image and all changes would be written to a memory filesystem on top of that pristine image? But this basically means all systems have to have the same pristine image (copying the image is nontrivial in time)...

Hopefully some of this makes sense. I'm open to suggestions :)