Re: Installing a system onto ZFS

On Sat, 6 Oct 2007, Stefan Esser wrote:
> What I do is install a minimal system into the UFS root (ad4s1a or
> whatever, to become the boot partition). Then I create the ZFS
> volumes from within, mounted on a temporary mount-point and copy
> over the whole contents of the minimum installation. After that, I
> fix the fstab entry in ZFS and prepare mounting of the boot partition
> on a directory in the ZFS root (fstab, mount point). Finally, I add
> the boot_from entry to /boot/loader.conf (on the boot partition).

Have you tried making a FreeSBIE disk? (USB or CDROM) and booting off 
that?

Doing so will give you a complete multiuser system which you can then 
install the system for real.

I have done some work with this but the latest motherboard I got for 
testing with causes BTX to blow up. I have tried 2 patches..
http://people.freebsd.org/~jhb/patches/btx_crx.patch
http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/realbtx/realbtx.2.patch

which fix it on the Supermicro P8SCT but not for the C2SBA (it spins 
writing register dumps and I haven't taken a picture of it yet..)

Note that sysinstall does not work very well as an installer if it is 
not run as init (by design really) as it will only modify the FreeSBIE 
stuff rather than the disk you want to install on. You could use it for 
partitioning disks although if you're using ZFS I guess not :)

One problem I have seen with those patches is that the loader appears to 
think a key has been pressed and pauses the count down when none have, 
I haven't had time to look at it though.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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