Having been away from FBSD since 2.1R (NBSD being my home for the intervening decade+), I thought it would be a good time to see how FBSD has evolved. Having one FBSD box would also save me the trouble of porting some applications to NBSD. I rescued a small server (6 core Xeon, 8x1TB, 256G RAM) to host the system.
My intention was to mimic the same disk layout as my NBSD boxes -- MBR (yes, it MUST be MBR and not GPT) with a BSD labeled slice. But, FBSD's disklabel() doesn't support more than 8 partitions (I have previously reported that bug).
Dropping into a shell, I convinced gpart() to let me mimic the layout by sneakerneting it from a NBSD host after previously wiping the first ~GB of the target drive..
But, no matter how I try to coax the installer to accept my layout, I can't get a bootable system. If I let it do the work, the system boots but ends up with a whopping huge 1TB partition and a tiny swap. Because the installer hides its actions (hint: why not route a copy of stdout and stderr to vty1?), I can't figure out what it is doing in one case (Auto layout) and NOT doing in the other (Manual).
[And, the installer has a bug that effectively means each failure requires a reboot (hint: try to RESTART after a failure in the file extraction and watch the dialogs carefully!). Also, the slice/size and mountpoint columns in the partition editor don't line up because the width of the "size" column isn't "fixed".]
Is there a trick to getting the installer to "take my word for it" and still have it install the various boot loader stages? (i.e., is this another bug?)
[And why is hw.mfi.mrsas_enable set to 0, by default? Should I be wary of that driver?]
My intention was to mimic the same disk layout as my NBSD boxes -- MBR (yes, it MUST be MBR and not GPT) with a BSD labeled slice. But, FBSD's disklabel() doesn't support more than 8 partitions (I have previously reported that bug).
Dropping into a shell, I convinced gpart() to let me mimic the layout by sneakerneting it from a NBSD host after previously wiping the first ~GB of the target drive..
But, no matter how I try to coax the installer to accept my layout, I can't get a bootable system. If I let it do the work, the system boots but ends up with a whopping huge 1TB partition and a tiny swap. Because the installer hides its actions (hint: why not route a copy of stdout and stderr to vty1?), I can't figure out what it is doing in one case (Auto layout) and NOT doing in the other (Manual).
[And, the installer has a bug that effectively means each failure requires a reboot (hint: try to RESTART after a failure in the file extraction and watch the dialogs carefully!). Also, the slice/size and mountpoint columns in the partition editor don't line up because the width of the "size" column isn't "fixed".]
Is there a trick to getting the installer to "take my word for it" and still have it install the various boot loader stages? (i.e., is this another bug?)
[And why is hw.mfi.mrsas_enable set to 0, by default? Should I be wary of that driver?]