I'm confused about the idea of flushing support for Dangerously Dedicated mode.
My current understanding is that dangerously dedicated mode is where you write a bsdlabel directly to disk at the top level, skipping the creation of a DOS-style MBR and partition table for maintaining compatibility with other OS's.
As far as I can see, there's nothing to stop you from still doing this by manually installing FreeBSD from a Fixit environment. What's to prevent you from bsdlabelling
/dev/ad0 instead of
/dev/ad0s1?
Would it be more correct to say that support for DD mode is
flushed from sysinstall, not from FreeBSD in general?
UPDATE
I did a bit of playing around with this, to try to answer my own question, I've found that it
is still possible to set up a "dangerously" dedicated system. Simply 'bsdlabel -B' the disk device, not a slice. This writes /boot/boot to the first 16 blocks of the disk (and gives partition 'a' a 16 block offset).
After completing the manual installation my test VM boots fine with the following partitions:
Code:
/dev/ada0a /
/dev/ada0b swap
/dev/ada0d /var
/dev/ada0e /usr
This was tested with 8.1-RELEASE-amd64, using the ahci module. /boot/loader.conf needed
Code:
vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/ada0a"