Re: FreeBSD, boot environments and /dev

On Mon, May 9, 2022 at 10:04 AM Dave Cottlehuber <dch@skunkwerks.at> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 9 May 2022, at 06:25, Michael Schuster wrote:
> > On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 12:15 AM Wes Maag <jwmaag@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> On Thu, May 5, 2022 at 4:10 PM Michael Schuster <michaelsprivate@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> Hi all,
> >>>
> >>> while still working (slowly) on an answer to my own question on the
> >>> right workflow to keep current up to date reliably with boot
> >>> environments, I noticed that after creating and mounting a new BE,
> >>> that new BE's /dev (eg /mnt/dev) is very sparsely populated:
>
> This is expected; /dev would usually be empty until devfs is mounted.

You're right - I have a few "historical" BEs lying around, and for
most of them, /dev/ is empty. As you guess (below), for the others,
they're most likely remnants of the first time I tried to do "pkg -c
/mnt" without /mnt/dev being mounted. (as an aside: when was that
changed? I know for sure that this hasn't always been necessary)

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?

Thx
Michael

>
> Looking into the unmounted /dev via the last zfs snapshot of your
> / filesystem should also be empty:
>
> $ ls -AFGhl /.zfs/snapshot/$(ls -rt /.zfs/snapshot/ | tail -1)/dev
> total 0
>
> If it's not I'd guess these are stray garbage from BE experiments
> where /dev wasn't mounted and various scripts & tools tried to pipe
> via /dev/{fd,zero,null,...}.
>
> If you created a hypothetical "empty" BE from scratch, unpacked
> src tarballs into it, it would also be empty.
>
> A+
> Dave



-- 
Michael Schuster
http://recursiveramblings.wordpress.com/
recursion, n: see 'recursion'