Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2025 22:02:38 +0000 From: Jordan Gordeev <jgopensource@proton.me> To: FreeBSD-CURRENT <freebsd-current@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Using a recovery partition to repair a broken installation of FreeBSD Message-ID: <tNazUalDQN8rT9zfb0ujxj5-eejd_ee47tlPRpP5NIg9PV9SAIotyDdkd5uu3M38IH9toS-2KblCuHztBlEVeaHlz1ua25HYWsMBp03z9KE=@proton.me> In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfrLS9ts7s6s=XpPK3044jz6_GQn_G-YCd-d0B-FO731jw@mail.gmail.com> References: <7b384ac0-9b24-43a4-bf63-012d745155a7@gmail.com> <aKD970iOlzyQNi0d@amaryllis.le-fay.org> <18e1a7e9-07d8-43a2-96af-0acdab6c2920@gmail.com> <babf662e-cded-4a2c-b5e8-c5a7175739f2@gmail.com> <98890564-ad8f-411a-9c00-45326a9d6ff5@gmail.com> <CANCZdfrLS9ts7s6s=XpPK3044jz6_GQn_G-YCd-d0B-FO731jw@mail.gmail.com>
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On Tuesday, 2 September 2025 at 22:27, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote: > > > On Tue, Sep 2, 2025 at 12:53 PM Graham Perrin <grahamperrin@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On 01/09/2025 02:58, Graham Perrin wrote: > > > An enhancement to bsdinstall could, before creation of the partition > > > table, allow the user to specify an amount of space to be left free at > > > the end of a device … > > > > > > For now, short term, is the (simple) free space idea attractive? > > > > Longer term: I'm not averse to more complex enhancements around e.g. > > /rescue/, however I _do_ like the idea of free space. > > > > Freedom for the user to do whatever they want. They might, or might not, > > want to use the space for the content of > > FreeBSD-15.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img … and so on. Maybe this overlaps > > with ZFS-specific bsdinstall report > > <https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=242983>. > > > Things are small enough, I'd rather just create it in the ESP directly. Special reserved space on disks are nothing but a pain. > I think the user should have a choice between a small rescue image residing as a file in the EFI System Partition and a big rescue image with more features residing in its own dedicated partition. On some machines the ESP will be too small for the first option so the option for a separate partition should definitely be supported. I want to suggest an enhancement to the default loader.efi (the one with the Lua interpreter) which will work for all styles of rescue images. Let's add a "rescue" command to the loader which will read and execute the script /efi/freebsd/rescue.lua from the ESP. The user can place a small rescue image in the ESP and write there a suitable rescue.lua script that can activate it, or they can create a whole rescue partition and write a different rescue.lua script to the ESP that knows how to activate the rescue partition. It will be a small change to the loader but at the same time it will be quite flexible. >From the user's perspective, if the boot fails and you are left at the loader's prompt, you just type "rescue". Users will probably pick from ready-made rescue images, each one coming with the necessary rescue.lua script, so there will be nothing difficult for the user to do. Best regards, Jordan Gordeevhome | help
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