rpi4 zfs-on-root boot-to-usb3

[Carl Johnson]

tech-lists <tech-lists at zyxst.net> writes:

> Hi,
>
> How can zfs-on-root boot-to-usb3 on rpi4 be accomplished?
>
> I've tried bsdinstall from a mmcsd-booted rpi4 but there seems to be
> problems with it that I can't work around. What's really needed is an
> installer, but these aren't made for arm64.aarch64 rpi4 from what I can
> see (I'm no expert though, it's entirely feasible i've missed
> something).
>
> Maybe one way of doing it would be to have a usb key (as ufs2) for the
> system to boot on, then have /home /usr/obj and other larger dirs on the
> usb3-zfs disk.

I am currently running a system that way (zfs-on-root and boot from
USB3), but I had problems doing it.  I used bsdinstall, but it
complained that it couldn't find a MANIFEST file and I couldn't find a
way around that.  It had already partitioned the disk and set up zfs, so
I just downloaded the base.txz and kernel.txz files from the FreeBSD
website and extracted them to the filesystem.  I then copied over the
u-boot and rpi-firmware files from the mmcsd to the appropriate
directories on the SSD, and booted it up.  I think the default on the
RPI4 is to boot from USB if there isn't a mmcsd card, or you can use the
RPi OS to reverse that if you want to.

Sorry if this doesn't sound as easy as it really should be.  This was
only a few weeks ago, but I didn't keep detailed notes of the exact
steps.

-- 
Carl Johnson		carlj at peak.org