Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:18:19 +0300 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: Jay Hall <jhall@socket.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Custom Kernel to Memory Stick Message-ID: <87eij14z44.fsf@kobe.laptop> In-Reply-To: <03658C6E-697A-43C5-9E6D-8B261D18F9A4@socket.net> (Jay Hall's message of "Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:49:08 -0500") References: <03658C6E-697A-43C5-9E6D-8B261D18F9A4@socket.net>
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On Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:49:08 -0500, Jay Hall <jhall@socket.net> wrote:
> Ladies and Gentlemen,
>
> I have been asked to explore the possibility of booting FreeBSD from a
> memory stick. This was not a problem; worked great when installed from
> the distribution CD.
>
> What would be the best way to get our custom configuration onto the
> memory stick?
The fastest way I know is to create an image to an 'image' file stored
on disk or ramdisk and then dd the image to the USB disk. You can
create a suitably large image with truncate(1), e.g.:
truncate -s 1g /var/tmp/image.bin
Then attach the image to an mdconfig device:
mdconfig -a -t vnode -u 20 -f /var/tmp/image.bin
Create a filesystem on it, and install everything from your buildworld
and buildkernel run:
fdisk -BI /dev/md20
bsdlabel -w -B /dev/md20s1
newfs -U /dev/md20s1a
Mount the new image partition before installkernel+installworld:
mount -t ufs /dev/md20s1a /mnt
Then you sould be able to install with DESTDIR pointing to the image
partition:
cd /usr/src
env DESTDIR=/mnt make installkernel installworld
Don't forgte to use mergemaster with -D /mnt to install the /mnt/etc
files from /usr/src/etc. Then tweak the /mnt/etc/fstab file to point at
the USB disk as the root filesystem.
Finally detach the image and write it on a USB disk:
umount /mnt
mdconfig -du 20
dd if=/var/tmp/image.bin of=/dev/da0 bs=4m
One of the nice tricks you can use for the root filesystem of the USB
disk is to add a UFS label to the USB root filesystem. This way you
don't have to assume that the USB root filesystem is called da0s1a but
you can use /dev/ufs/LABELNAME in the fstab file of the image partition.
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