Tools for FreeBSD development

[Robert Watson]

On Sat, 2 Dec 2006, Kevin Sanders wrote:

> On 12/2/06, Alexander Kabaev <kabaev at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I personally think that having a dedicated box in disk-less configuration 
>> is the best option out there. The ability to quickly go through series of 
>> hands/reboots without any associated fsck runs and without the risk of 
>> terminally damaging any local FS is priceless. If qemu can be tricked into 
>> disk-less booting, it should be just as good though.
>
> Alexander, when you say disk-less configuration, are you referring to 
> booting from a network image/server?  That's an interesting idea.  I'm 
> fairly new to FreeBSD development also, and prefer the speed of a dedicated 
> box, but recently suffered my first corrupted beyond repair system.

This is exactly the setup I use also.  Most typically, the setup involves a 
central development server running -STABLE, with a private network link to a 
series of crash boxes.  The development server NFS exports a file system to 
use as an NFS root and for file sharing, as well as running tftp and dhcp 
servers.  The test boxes use PXE to boot fom the central server.  Each test 
system has its own exported root, so I can use individual loader.conf's to 
tell test systems to boot off NFS, boot off local disks, etc.  I always load 
the kernel over NFS using pxeboot, regardless of whether I boot boxes with a 
local root.

You get some very nice effects -- you can easily move boxes between FreeBSD 
versions by switching out root file system symlinks, you can be building the 
next kernel while the previous one dumps core, etc.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge