Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2013 22:02:56 +0200 (CEST) From: Conny Andersson <ataraxi@telia.com> To: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com> Cc: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD slices and the Boot Manager Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1307281809550.1471@alice.nodomain.nowhere> In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1307280814400.8473@wonkity.com> References: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1306291951460.1488@alice.nodomain.nowhere> <20130728080912.c6ce592a.freebsd@edvax.de> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1307280814400.8473@wonkity.com>
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Hi Warren and Polytropon, A few minutes ago I booted up from a FreeBSD-8.4-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img to experience that it is sysinstall that is used in that release. Next, I did a 'dummy' custom installation. And, as I supposed sysinstall recognized disk ada0 as ad4 and disk ada1 as ad6. Then I aborted sysinstall and rebooted in to my FreeBSD 8.3-Release. Well, AHCI (Serial ATA Advanced Host Controller Interface driver) seems involved when identifying disks and slices. But, only on newer computers who has this option set to on in the BIOS. Maybe, bsdinstall in FreeBSD 9.0 and onwards can make use of AHCI directly. When I bought this workstation and installed FreeBSD I thought something was very much wrong with the wiring of the hardware/disks and I phoned Dell's support ... without being much wiser. My old Dell workstation on which I have used all the FreeBSD's from release 4.8 up to 8.0 I always got ad0 and ad1 as the disks in use. So, I had to search the Internet for an answer why my new computer numbered disks oddly. And I found your web page Warren (http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/ahci.html) and I also read the ahci man page. I also had to edit my /etc/fstab accordingly. My FreeBSD 8.3 /etc/fstab: # Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass# /dev/ada1s3b none swap sw 0 0 /dev/ada1s3a / ufs rw 1 1 /dev/ada1s3d /home ufs rw 2 2 /dev/acd0 /cdrom cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0 proc /proc procfs rw 0 0 linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0 Apropos labels, I only have two filesystems (+swap) on each slice, as I only run a desktop workstation. I do that following Greg Lehey's advise in his book "The Complete FreeBSD" 4th Edition. More apropos labels: The latest BIOS version 2.4.0 for Dell T1500 does not support UEFI/GPT/GUID. As far as I know, Dell only have the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface on its PowerEdge servers. (The reason why I want to merge two slices into one big ada1s1 is the need for more disk space for FreeBSD 8.4 and keep 8.3 as it is, but then as slice 2). Thank you, Conny > On Sun, 28 Jul 2013, Warren Block wrote: > On Sun, 28 Jul 2013, Polytropon wrote: >> On Sat, 27 Jul 2013 19:39:30 +0200 (CEST), Conny Andersson wrote: > >>> A very important question is if sysinstall's option "Install the FreeBSD >>> Boot Manager" detects that I have a FreeBSD 8.3 and detect it as slice 2 >>> on >>> disk 1? >> >> I'm not sure I'm following you correctly. The sysinstall program >> is considered obsolete, the new system installer is bsdinstall. > > AFAIK, sysinstall is still used in FreeBSD 8.X, and bsdinstall does not have > a boot manager option anyway. > >>> So it becomes a boot option when I am rebooting? (Maybe the slice >>> may come up as ad6s2, because AHCI in FreeBSD 8.4 isn't enabled at the >>> time >>> of the install.) > > Sorry, I don't understand this at all. AHCI should not be involved with > identifying slices. > >> That is a _good_ consideration! To make sure things work independently >> from "boot-time recognition", use labels for the file system and then >> mount them by using the labels. Encode the OS version number in the >> labels, so it's even easier to deal with them. Use "newfs -L" on >> un-mounted partitions (you can do that from the install media). > > For existing filesystems, that would be tunefs -L. And agreed, filesystem > labels make relocation much easier.
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