/boot on a separate partition

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 9:30 PM +0100 7/18/05, Ross Kendall Axe wrote:
>
>... I want to place the /boot directory in a small 25MB partition
>at the start of the drive.  Setting up the partition with sysinstall
>is easy enough, but does anyone have any suggestions of how to
>diddle the bootloader to accept this configuration?

I doubt you can on FreeBSD.  The problem is that the OS would have
to mount both / and /boot before it could do anything, and FreeBSD
doesn't do that.  It assumes the partition that you are loading
from is '/', and uses that to find (for instance) /etc/fstab so
it can find out what the other partitions are.

I know that linux supports this, as well as some other clever
trickery with partitions at system-startup, but FreeBSD doesn't.

>I don't particularly want to go for the standard 'small / partition
>and separate partitions for /usr, /var, /home...' since I only have
>a 1GB drive to play with and judging the partition sizes down the
>nearest KB would be... tricky.

Create a small-ish / partition, a swap partition, and huge /usr
partition.  FreeBSD creates a symlink from /home to /usr/home, so
your home directories are in /usr anyway.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu