How customized can an mfsroot be?

[Tim Judd]

On 4/5/10, Peter Steele <psteele at maxiscale.com> wrote:
> We have a USB boot stick based cloning process that we're considering
> porting to a DVD based media. I'm not sure though that it's possible due to
> the restrictions I've seen in the mfsroot environment we'd have to use. For
> example, in our USB disk procedure, we create partitions using gpart and set
> up mirroring for the OS partitions. We even recognize 3Ware controllers and
> automatically create logical RAID sets from the available drives. In some
> earlier work I did with a pxe boot server a couple of years ago, I know that
> I could not setup mirrors via sysinstall and I assume that hasn't changed in
> FreeBSD 8. Is it possible to customize the mfsroot environment to run a
> larger variety of commands to allow us to duplicate the cloning process we
> use with USB boot sticks or is this project likely not doable?
>


I'm working through my own livecd boot mechanism currently.

>From my experience, there is a limit on how much space you can fit
into the kernel.. for modules.  mfs_root is considered a module.

Based on previous projects such as freesbie, mfsbsd, etc, you can run
between a 50-100MB compressed mfs_root to find how much data you can
store on that medium.  But ... why are you constricting yourself to
use mfs_root?  I have many times ran FreeBSD completely from CDrom,
which will give you all 700 (or a DVD, 4.3G) usable space.


I'd be happy to help, if you have questions.  but please direct the
questions to the mailing list.



--Tim