Re: FreeBSD, boot environments and /dev

From: Dave Cottlehuber <dch_at_skunkwerks.at>
Date: Thu, 12 May 2022 07:20:40 UTC
On Thu, 12 May 2022, at 07:12, Michael Schuster wrote:
> On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 11:38 PM Dave Cottlehuber <dch@skunkwerks.at> wrote:
>> On Wed, 11 May 2022, at 14:58, Michael Schuster wrote:
>> > I then created a new BE, mounted it on /mnt, removed /mnt/dev/* (only
>> > regular files and empty directories). Booting into that BE didn't work
>> > either, I got errors about missing "/dev/" files (can't recall the
>> > exact names).
>> >
>> > What do you guys (plural ;-)) think?
>
> Hi Dave,
> thx for your perseverance :-)
>
> I have (at least) one question for you before I attempt this:
> where do I get these .txz files?

https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapshots/amd64/amd64/14.0-CURRENT/
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/amd64/amd64/13.1-RC6/

> should devfs be in /etc/fstab? in my current BE, it isn't ... 

this is the bare minimum I used. NB my partitions have artisanal
GPT labels, yours will probably be different.

# Device                Mountpoint              FStype          Options                         Dump    Pass#
#/dev/gpt/swap0         none                    swap            sw                              0       0
/dev/gpt/efiboot        /boot/efi               msdosfs         rw,late,longnames               0       0
tmpfs                   /tmp                    tmpfs           rw,mode=01777,size=120g         0       0

thats all I needed to boot to userland & login. I'm reasonably sure that,
assuming you have a default zfs install, you'd not need anything in /etc/fstab
to boot.
 
> if so: do you have an example of such a line? In the instances I looked 
> up, I wasn't quite able to make it work (but perhaps that's a dead end 
> anyway).
>
>> # bectl activate -t vanilla
>
> does that ("activate -t") work on UEFI systems? The last time I used it 
> (at least a year ago), it wasn't.

Yes it does here. failing that just use `bectl activate`. The -t is
a very nice addition.

Well, we're definitely on the FreeBSD-current email list here, so it's
definitely in CURRENT, and 13.1 RC.

A+
Dave