Re: Notes on improving the installer

On Tue, Jun 17, 2025, at 12:50 PM, David Chisnall wrote:

> If you enable encrypted swap in the installer, it creates fstab entries 
> that create the GELI devices. It does not label the partitions (swap0, 
> swap1, or something useful) but uses the raw device nodes. Nothing in 
> the system appears to check the underlying partition type when enabling 
> swap on these devices, so if you plug in another device and things are 
> renumbered then swapping will write nonsense over a different partition 
> (I was fortunate that, when this happened to me, the destroyed 
> partition was one I was planning to delete anyway).

This item took out FreshPorts recently. It was a few hours of tense negotiations.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/zpool-missing-after-increasing-disk-size-aws.98986/#post-714444

In my case, the solution was easy: disable swap, import the pool.

I have since moved to using "/dev/gpt/swap01 none swap sw         0 0" in /etc/fstab

> I think I have filed bugs about all of these issues. It would be great 
> if folks looking to improve the installer could consider some of them.

David: do you know the bug IDs please?

Thank you.

-- 
  Dan Langille
  dan@langille.org