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If anyone is interested, I was successfully able to install Gentoo |
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FreeBSD using a separate /boot partition. I don't know if some of you |
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have done this, but below are notes from my experience. Googling for |
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this came up with relatively little (some info I found did help, but it |
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seems there are not many who have bothered with this). |
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The Gentoo page on installing FreeBSD suggests using one giant partition |
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and turning off soft-updates. I wanted to avoid this (since many system |
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files are read/written during use of the OS, I want them to be as fast |
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as possible). One way would be to make separate /usr, /var, etc. |
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partitions as suggested in the FreeBSD handbook (leaving only "/", and |
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therefore "/boot", as non-soft-updates, since they would not see much |
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write activity), but some hard links in the gfbsd stage3 tarball made |
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this problematic (links between the bin dirs outside /usr to within |
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their /usr counterparts). I could have broken these links, but I wanted |
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to leave the system as the gfbsd folks designed it. |
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So I figured I'd try what I usually have done on Linux: make a small |
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(256M) "/boot" on /dev/ad0s1a, a large (~40G) "/" on /dev/ad0s1d, and |
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leave the rest for "/home" on /dev/ad0s1h. At least this lets me keep |
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my data and home dir files if I need to do a clean re-install. Soft |
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updates would be off on /boot but on on the other two. Also, not sure |
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it matters, but in /etc/fstab, I put the line for "/" (ad0s1d) first. |
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I came upon two issues: |
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1) The boot loader expects the kernel to be in "/boot/..." |
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2) The system has trouble finding "/" (the root) on booting |
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#1 is easy: If you do the usual thing and mount the boot partition on |
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/boot, there will be no "/boot/" prefix, so move its contents into a |
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subdirectory called "boot" within the boot partition. Now mount this |
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boot partition on "/mnt/boot" and make a symlink called "/boot" -> |
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"/mnt/boot/boot". The files will then be seen in their usual place when |
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the system boots, and the boot partition will look correct when first |
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booting too. |
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#2: When you first boot your system, you'll be asked to manually specify |
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where "root" is (in my case, "ufs:ad0s1d" did the trick). But I did not |
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want to have to type this every time I booted! I tried using grub, |
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thinking it might enable me to specify root like Linux does, but the |
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config was just wanting the boot partition, and there seemed no obvious |
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way to set what root would be after boot (BTW, I did get disk error 29 |
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before heeding Gentoo's sysctl hint for grub). I ended up finding some |
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info that suggested creating a "/boot/loader.conf" file and adding this |
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line: |
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vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:ad0s1d" |
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This worked. Now my system boots normally, and I have what seems a sane |
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partitioning scheme! |
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|
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-Joe |
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-- |
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