Root partition and usrland on one slice, /usr/local ports and src on another

[Lowell Gilbert]

lankfordandrew at charter.net writes:

> When I installed FreeBSD 10 on an old laptop, I wanted to merge both
> the root partition heirarchy (kernel /bin /sbin etc) and the rest of
> Fbsd usr-land together onto one slice. I like upgrading from source,
> but I do that more frequently with ports than the OS-proper. When I
> need to boot up single user, it seems rather quaint these days (at
> least for a laptop user) to have to mount /usr in order to get
> reasonably the functionality from applications that use shared
> libraries (vi, man pages, etc). The likelyhood that I'm going to fall
> back on a serial port and an ASR-33 tty are nil.
>
> So what I'd like to do is put the entire freebsd system on one fairly
> small, pristine slice, but put the more bloated and ephemeral src,
> ports, /usr/local, /home portions on one big slice. I tried symlinks
> between "/src" or "/usr/src" and "/usr/ports" and tweaking some build
> variables, but it seemed like something always breaks in some bizarre
> way whenever I tried to rebuild world. I guess a lot of the strange
> behavior showed up in /src/contrib and the gnu licensed side of the
> build system. Can anyone suggest some docs on /src and ports,
> specifically for what I'm trying to do besides "man src"?

For your case, I'd recommend just putting everything into a
single slice. The installer even does that these days, if I
recall correctly.

That said, what you're describing should work fine. Having
/usr/src, /usr/obj, and /usr/ports all be symlinks works fine for
me in a chroot I'm using (I don't do it with laptops any more
because I use NFS instead).