Firstboot behavior, was Re: New vm-image size is much smaller than previos

[changed subject to follow drift of conversation]

On Sat, May 04, 2019 at 06:03:00AM -0700, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> 
> Do we even have install note(s) pages for these things, or a wiki page

Not that I know of.
 
> that documents it, or ?    Working around /firstboot does not require
> a serial console, if you know about it ahead of time, you can even
                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
8-)

The statement is true.  The gymnastics required to
> mount the sd image up on another system, and remove firstboot if you
> want, or create a swap partition at the end of the device, make the
> boot partition use up the rest and then iirc growfs on firstboot does
> what you want. (Untested at this time, but that should just work.)
are far from trivial, even for experienced foot-shooters such as myself.

A Pi running Raspbian can download and write the FreeBSD image, but it
can't mount ufs to manipulate files. I'm not sure about Mac OS and Windows.
That's a likely starting scenario for potential users of FreeBSD on the Pi. 

AFAIK it's still necessary to boot single-user, set up the microSD (which is 
a considerable challenge using gpart unless one is in good practice) and then
let the system go to multi-user. Last time I checked, u-boot (or maybe it's
loader)  couldn't read the USB keyboard to execute boot -s so the system
essentially runs away from the user's control. I admit not having checked
in the last few months, but even if it's fixed asking a new user to start
by using gpart is unlikely to encourage further exploration. 

Thanks for your attention!

bob prohaska