some questions about disk partitioning and filesystems and booting

[Dewayne Geraghty]

David,
Two small points:
when using "glabel status" I can see both the glabel assigned label and
the tunefs file system label on an MBR usb drive

         label/ss1     N/A  da0s2d
           ufs/ss1     N/A  da0s2d
        label/keys     N/A  da0s2e
          ufs/keys     N/A  da0s2e
perhaps its an enhancement on my 12.1Stable system? :)

In regard to running without swap and crashing, you may have overlooked
setting:
vm.swap_enabled=0
vm.nswapdev=0
(taken from a system without swap that's been running for a few years)

My use of swap, like you, is limited to wanting a mini kernel dump, and
using swap space for memory devices (mdconfig).  Though I do have swap
on another disk when I really need all of memory to be dumped, which has
been about once in 10 years ;)

Cheers.