Install Tips for Newbie with FreeBSD 10

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 01/02/14 20:37, precutcolours at mailcan.com wrote:
> I'd like tips for installing FreeBSD 10 on a PowerPC G5 + 2 GiB RAM.
>
> The old OpenFirmware needs an Apple Partition Map to boot but will boot
> over USB, which I've tested.
>
> My plan is to carve the required Apple Partition Map on a 'minimalist'
> USB flash stick, with pivot to the 'real' FreeBSD system on a hard disk.
> That disk will use a GUID table and ZFS. It's external too (USB or
> FireWire). There is no internal disk at all.
>
> My notion is to rig the thumb drive just for (1) APM and (2) fast
> bootup. Reads are fast...writes horrible. The min would be GRUB I guess?
> But it could hold a kernel, and maybe more. What's best?

You can use APM with ZFS; that's not a problem at all. The only
restriction is that the kernel must be on UFS for the time being. You
could use GPT, but that will only complicate things and provides no
particular benefit. The easy thing is to make a relatively small /
partition (UFS) from the installer, install to that, and then set up ZFS
on the rest of the disk(s) once you've rebooted into the installed
system for home etc. You'll want the 64-bit PowerPC disks to get decent
performance out of ZFS, by the way.
> I may just need a good fstab, but I'm unacquainted with ZFS, and so open
> to advice on it; /tmp will live in RAM; there will be no swap space.
>
> I want to run a lot from RAM, with sync to disk at intervals or
> shutdown. $HOME lives in RAM and syncs. It's only for dotfiles and
> prefs. Big data (vids/pics/docs/etc) live elsewhere. Putting $HOME in
> RAM is odd but speeds a system and saves the day in power crashes.
>
> I'd like nightly auto upgrades if possible. Can v10's new packaging
> system do them? Does FreeBSD have an app for that?
>

It can. However, due to some in-progress infrastructure adjustments, the
FreeBSD project is not currently providing prebuilt PowerPC packages, so
it won't work in your case.
-Nathan