Re: adding swap when expanding root filesystem

On Mon, Nov 07, 2022 at 12:47:29PM -0600, Mike Karels wrote:
> On 7 Nov 2022, at 11:52, bob prohaska wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Nov 07, 2022 at 10:10:38AM -0600, Mike Karels wrote:
[snip]

> >> I have a prototype,
> >> and wondered if this is a good thing to do.  Granted, this will often
> >> create swap on microSD, which is not optimal, but probably better than
> >> nothing.
> >> 
[snip]

Definitely better than nothing. I think it's a good thing to do.

> >> The current prototype creates a swap partition which is 1/10 of the disk
> >> if the disk is at least 15 GB and the initial root partition is no more
> >> than 1/3 of the disk, but only up to 1.5x of physical memory.  I would
> >> probably enable this by default, but provide a way to disable it via a
> >> kenv variable and/or a variable in /etc/rc.conf.
> >>
> >> Thoughts?
> >

"Yes, please!". I'd suggest 2-4x physical RAM rather than 1.5x,
simply because extra swap is harmless and microSD cards are 
amply large; 64GB was about the smallest readily available 
last time I looked. Now it's probably 128GB. 

It might be wise to add a warning about flash wearing out,
but it took a year of near-continuous buildworlds to kill
a 128GB microSD holding -current on a Pi3 with ~3 GB swap.

Anything done to make FreeBSD work better on Raspberry Pi
and competitors is worth a try. Running from microSD isn't
ideal but does work if used gently. It worked much better
under armv7. Between aarch64 and growth in compilers
working swap seems essential now, the more the better. 
 
> > For starters, is there any hope of making bsdinstall run from the
> > microSD and installing FreeBSD via the traditional process on USB?
[snip]
> 
> I think that???s a completely different problem.  I suspect that this
> is already possible, fetching packages over the net, but I don???t
> know the incantation.  Ideally the packages would be local, but then
> the image would be more like a CD-ROM.  It would be nice to have
> a procedure documented though.
>
Since there's a complete system on the microSD can't that be used
as the initial repository?

I agree it is a different problem in terms of implementation. 
If bsdinstall can format a boot device for Raspberry Pi I should 
give it a try.

Thanks for reading!

bob prohaska