Re: Installing 13.1 ARM on SSD

On 2022-Jul-8, at 12:15, John Kennedy <warlock@phouka.net> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 08, 2022 at 06:26:59PM +0000, Wall, Stephen wrote:
>> I tried something like this - I used rsync to replicate the SD card's (mounted) msdos partition onto the SSD's (also mounted) efi partition.  That got past the firmware message, but then it stopped in the boot loader asking for a partition to boot from.  'zfs:zroot/ROOT/default' resulted in an unknown partition.
>> 
>> At the moment, I'm running with the SSD imaged from the FreeBSD RPI .img file, and that is working, but it's UFS, not ZFS.  I'll give your steps a try, and if I get nowhere, I might wind up creating a UFS partition for root and boot, and make the rest of the disk zfs with my desired filesystems.
> 
>  So, bsdinstall should have set that up (zroot/ROOT/default).  From the
> UFS disk, I think (off the top of my head) you can just do a "zfs import
> zroot" and then you should be able to see it (and everything else) with
> a:  "zfs list -tall -r zroot"  If you picked something other than zroot
> for the pool name, you might need to do some more tweaking.
> 
>  In my case, my USB disk is only ~256G.

"The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System"
says about ZFS (page 548):

"Like all non-overwritingfile systems, ZFS operates best
when at least a quarter of its disk pool is free. Write
throughout becomes poor when the pool gets too full. By
contrast, UFS can run well to 95 percent full and acceptably
to 99 percent full."

So, for a 256 GiByte USB disk used basically just as space for
one ZFS area (so nearly all the 256 GiBytes is available),
That would mean being careful to avoid having much less than
64 GiBytes free on the media: hopefully using less than 192
192 GiBytes of space at all times.


> I don't know if uboot has any
> BIOS limitations like old x86 did.  I've never had to be too wary, but
> then I've never had BIOS-breaking SSDs laying around to attach to RPI.
> 
>  I think uboot has some commands that might let you do some zfs
> exploration, but hate to point you at web resources because there seems
> to be a huge variations in what we end up with on FreeBSD/RPI.  My RPI
> is a few hours into a firefox rebuild so I can't give you some real
> guidance from what I'm using at the moment.


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com