Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2010 22:05:36 +1030 From: Matt Thyer <matt.thyer@gmail.com> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Is /boot updated by "make installkernel" or by "make installworld" ? Message-ID: <AANLkTik97tEzK8cKugraZTPf2hcEUQVr7D5NkyASaUp5@mail.gmail.com>
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Background I'm running a ZFS FreeBSD-STABLE system on Western Digital 2TB EARS models green drives. These are the so called "Advanced Format Drives" that use a 4KiB block size internally but lie about this to the operating system and claim to use 512 byte blocks. This causes all sorts of performance issues so after some experimentation I ended up creating my ZFS pool directly on gnop 4KiB block size devices on top of the raw disks themselves. To avoid having to run a separate boot disk, I've used a work around of a 1GB USB stick which contains just /boot with the /boot/kernel directory containing only "kernel", "opensolaris.ko", "zfs.ko" & "aio.ko" (for samba 3.4 using async I/O). This requires only 14MB on the USB stick and boots nicely with the USB /boot/loader.conf telling the kernel to mount root from the ZFS pool. P.S. Don't forget to use DOS "wdidle3" to increase the 8 second head parking timeout up to 5 minutes with these drives. Now how to update the system ? My update world script follows the recommended procedure in the source Makefiles for updating the system and does an install kernel before rebooting into single user mode to install the new world (via an /etc/rc.d/ script). So my question relates to when I should update my USB stick's /boot directory. I'm assuming that the /boot directory should be owned by the kernel and could be updated by a "make installkernel" (which is what I do after building the world but before my reboot into single user to install the world). Is my assumption correct ? i.e. does a "make installkernel" replace the contents of "/boot" ? or is "/boot" updated by a "make installworld" ? Matt.
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