Daniel O'Connor wrote:
On Tue, 2 Jun 2009, Dan Naumov wrote:
USB root partition for booting off UFS is something I have
considered. I have looked around and it seems that all the "install
FreeBSD onto USB stick" guides seem to involve a lot of manual work
from a fixit environment, does sysinstall not recognise USB drives as
a valid disk device to parition/label/install FreeBSD on? If I do go
with an USB boot/root, what things I should absolutely keep on it and
which are "safe" to move to a ZFS pool? The idea is that in case my
ZFS configuration goes bonkers for some reason, I still have a fully
workable singleuser configuration to boot from for recovery.
It should see them as SCSI disks, note that if you plug them in after
the installer boots you will need to go into Options and tell it to
rescan the devices.
I haven't really used USB flash for many years, but I remember when
they first started appearing on the shelves, they got well known for
their horrible reliability (stick would die within a year of use,
etc). Have they improved to the point of being good enough to host a
root partition on, without having to setup some crazy GEOM mirror
setup using 2 of them?
I would expect one to last a long time if you only use it for /boot and
use ZFS for the rest (or even just moving /var onto ZFS would save
heaps of writes).
I am using this setup (booting from USB with UFS) in our backup storage
server with FreeBSD 7.2 + ZFS.
2GB USB flash disk contains normal installation of the whole system, but
is set to read only in fstab. ZFS is used for /tmp /var /usr/ports
/usr/src /usr/obj and storage.
root filesystem is remounted read write only for some configuration
changes, then remounted back to read only.
Miroslav Lachman
# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ufs/2gLive 1.6G 863M 642M 57% /
devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev
tank 1.1T 128K 1.1T 0% /tank
tank/system 1.1T 128K 1.1T 0% /tank/system
tank/system/usr 1.1T 128K 1.1T 0%
/tank/system/usr
tank/system/tmp 1.1T 128K 1.1T 0% /tmp
tank/system/usr/obj 1.1T 128K 1.1T 0% /usr/obj
tank/system/usr/ports 1.1T 218M 1.1T 0% /usr/ports
tank/system/usr/ports/distfiles 1.1T 108M 1.1T 0%
/usr/ports/distfiles
tank/system/usr/ports/packages 1.1T 125M 1.1T 0%
/usr/ports/packages
tank/system/usr/src 1.1T 171M 1.1T 0% /usr/src
tank/system/var 1.1T 256K 1.1T 0% /var
tank/system/var/db 1.1T 716M 1.1T 0% /var/db
tank/system/var/db/pkg 1.1T 384K 1.1T 0% /var/db/pkg
tank/system/var/log 1.1T 45M 1.1T 0% /var/log
tank/system/var/run 1.1T 128K 1.1T 0% /var/run
tank/vol0 2.6T 1.5T 1.1T 57% /vol0
tank/vol0/mon 1.1T 128K 1.1T 0% /vol0/mon
(some filesystems are using compression, that's why ports and var are
splitted in to more filesystems)
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