Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 07 Nov 2022 12:47:29 -0600
From:      Mike Karels <mike@karels.net>
To:        bob prohaska <fbsd@www.zefox.net>
Cc:        freebsd-arm@freebsd.org, jmg@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: adding swap when expanding root filesystem
Message-ID:  <78C2FBC4-D2CE-44B0-9535-02C0EDECD10A@karels.net>
In-Reply-To: <20221107175206.GA49113@www.zefox.net>
References:  <202211071610.2A7GAcHl090048@mail.karels.net> <20221107175206.GA49113@www.zefox.net>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On 7 Nov 2022, at 11:52, bob prohaska wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 07, 2022 at 10:10:38AM -0600, Mike Karels wrote:
>> This question is not really arm-specific, but I couldn't think of a be=
tter
>> mailing list for it.
>>
>> There are peridic issues reported on small systems like Raspberry Pi
>> where people are running buildworld or poudriere and running out of
>> memory.  As the user gets no control over the disk layout when install=
ing,
>> there is no option to add swap space on the install image.  I have add=
ed
>> swap space on a USB disk, but this is often not an option.  It occurre=
d
>> to me that it might be reasonable to add swap space before expanding
>> the root filesystem if there is sufficient space.  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.
>>
>> The current prototype creates a swap partition which is 1/10 of the di=
sk
>> if the disk is at least 15 GB and the initial root partition is no mor=
e
>> 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?
>
> For starters, is there any hope of making bsdinstall run from the
> microSD and installing FreeBSD via the traditional process on USB?
> No need to limit to USB, but that's a useful option for RPi and one
> option for many more devices. That treats microSD like a boot
> floppy.

I think that=E2=80=99s a completely different problem.  I suspect that th=
is
is already possible, fetching packages over the net, but I don=E2=80=99t
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.

		Mike

> I haven't looked at bsdinstall in a very long time, so maybe the
> traditional installation process isn't as I remember it. ISTR it
> allowing selection of a boot device, a swap device and at least
> one /usr device. Maybe I'm confusing it with Jordan Hubbard's
> installer.
>
> Thanks for reading, and apologies if I'm hopelessly out of date.
>
> bob prohaska



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?78C2FBC4-D2CE-44B0-9535-02C0EDECD10A>