FreeBSD slices and the Boot Manager

[Warren Block]

On Sun, 28 Jul 2013, Polytropon wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Jul 2013 19:39:30 +0200 (CEST), Conny Andersson wrote:

>> A very important question is if sysinstall's option "Install the FreeBSD
>> Boot Manager" detects that I have a FreeBSD 8.3 and detect it as slice 2 on
>> disk 1?
>
> I'm not sure I'm following you correctly. The sysinstall program
> is considered obsolete, the new system installer is bsdinstall.

AFAIK, sysinstall is still used in FreeBSD 8.X, and bsdinstall does not 
have a boot manager option anyway.

>> So it becomes a boot option when I am rebooting? (Maybe the slice
>> may come up as ad6s2, because AHCI in FreeBSD 8.4 isn't enabled at the time
>> of the install.)

Sorry, I don't understand this at all.  AHCI should not be involved with 
identifying slices.

> That is a _good_ consideration! To make sure things work independently
> from "boot-time recognition", use labels for the file system and then
> mount them by using the labels. Encode the OS version number in the
> labels, so it's even easier to deal with them. Use "newfs -L" on
> un-mounted partitions (you can do that from the install media).

For existing filesystems, that would be tunefs -L.  And agreed, 
filesystem labels make relocation much easier.