FreeBSD on AWS with root-on-zfs?

[Victor Sudakov]

Victor Sudakov wrote:
> Victor Sudakov wrote:
> > Matthew Seaman wrote:
> > > > Is anyone using FreeBSD as a EC2 instance, what would you do if you
> > > > wanted a root-on-zfs AMI?
> > > 
> > > Colin Percival published some root-on-ZFS AMIs a while back -- see
> > > https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-cloud/2019-February/000200.html
> > 
> > Good news.
> > 
> > > 
> > > I've used these with great success.  I haven't seen an announcement of a
> > > 12.1-RELEASE version yet -- not sure what Colin's plans are, but I think
> > > the idea was to offer this layout as an additional set of the official
> > > FreeBSD AMIs at some point.
> > 
> > 
> > I've just launched an EC2 instance with "FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE-amd64 ZFS
> > (ami-054939ebd299da308)".  It works!
> > 
> > I think I can freebsd-update it to 12.1 myself until a 12.1 AMI is
> > available.
> > 
> > Thanks! And I should go and support Colin's endeavor.
> 
> One of the major advantages of the root-on-ZFS configuration is the
> possibility to select a different BE from the loader prompt if something
> goes wrong with the current BE.
> 
> On AWS, the loader prompt is inaccesible, so how can we utilize this
> powerful feature?

Answering my own question, "bectl activate" has the "-t" flag:

If the [-t] flag is given, this takes effect only for the next boot.

This does not work in bhyve for some reason (does not boot the temporary BE):
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=244838
but may work in AWS because it does not use bhyveload hopefully.


-- 
Victor Sudakov,  VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN
2:5005/49 at fidonet http://vas.tomsk.ru/
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