On 7/14/19 4:37 PM, Pete Wright wrote:
Hey there folks,
I am wondering if anyone has any pointers on creating a custom Qcow2 FreeBSD that is akin in size to nanobsd.  I have an environment where we need to run a single binary and want to keep our disk image as small as possible.  It will run inside a user-mode Qemu process.  Reading through the nanobsd script it seems that it expects a raw disk for installation, so I do think using the nanobsd script itself well work well.  Has anyone else done something similar?  My goal is to have a disk image that is around 500MB.

Thanks in advance!
-pete



I wanted to close the loop on this discussion as I think I've found a workable solution for my use-case.  I'm using a three step process:

1) generate a raw disk image using "poudriere image".  This phase references a Jail I've built that has disabled lots of uneeded features as per the docs here:
https://bsdrp.net/documentation/technical_docs/poudriere

2) next I use mkimg(1) to convert the raw disk image to a bootable qcow2 image that I can boot from Qemu.  this results in a disk image that's about 800MB.

3) the final phase is to use qemu-img to create a compressed qcow2 image.  the resulting artifact of that process is a ~325MB Qcow2 diskimage that actually has decent performance (on my SSD backed zfs filesystem).

I attempted to use poudriere image to generate a usb image directly, and while that did work well sizing wise i ran into an issue where insufficient inodes were allocated.  I reference what I ran into in this github issue:
https://github.com/freebsd/poudriere/issues/701

For me this current setup is fine for my purposes, although I'm sure others can optimize this workflow a bit :)

Also, thanks again Allan and Dave Cottlehuber (who pinged me offlist) for giving me some hints and pointing me in the right direction!

Cheers,
-pete

--
Pete Wright
p...@nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA

_______________________________________________
freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org mailing list
https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-virtualization
To unsubscribe, send any mail to 
"freebsd-virtualization-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"

Reply via email to