7.3-BETA1 Available... [memstick.img?]

[Ian Smith]

On Sat, 30 Jan 2010, Ken Smith wrote:
 > On Sat, 2010-01-30 at 17:17 +1100, Ian Smith wrote:
 > 
 > > are there any plans afoot to release memstick.img/s for 7.3-R?
 > > 
 > > If so, where should I look for information on how it may be done?
 > > 
 > > If not, is there something about RELENG_7 precluding that?  USB stack?
 > 
 > No, no plans afoot for memsticks for the balance of the 7.X releases.
 > The sysinstall support for installing from a USB based disk didn't get
 > MFCed to stable/7.  Even if it was we're already something of a
 > heavyweight on images (both CDs-with-packages and DVD) so my plan all
 > along had been to phase in the memstick image for stable/8 and at the
 > same time drop CDs-with-packages.

Ah, fair enough.  So maybe a DVD-sized memstick.img for 8.1? :)

 > > My search for information on the particular recipe/s used to make the 
 > > 8.0-R memstick images has proven fruitless so far, despite several 
 > > useful suggestions on ways to make various other sorts of bootable USB 
 > > stick images.  So far they seem to have been made out-of-band, somehow?
 > > 
 > > My particular interest is in putting DVD release/s onto a 4GB(+) stick, 
 > > hopefully on bootable slices rather than 'dangerously dedicated' form.
 > 
 > I was more or less experimenting with the memsticks for 8.0 and never
 > quite got around to packaging up what I do into a script.  I'll try to
 > get something along those lines into the tree some time soon.  Release
 > builds are done in two passes - the first pass creates all the
 > directories needed but stops there giving me a chance to add stuff to
 > those directories.  That's where I put the packages into place if there
 > are going to be any.  After doing that the second pass runs which builds
 > the ISO images.  After the first pass I briefly put the packages
 > directory that is supposed to be on disc1 (which is just the docs
 > packages, sysinstall gets grumpy if those aren't present) into the dvd1
 > directory and do this:

And /fixit too, I gather?  Cool, I wondered how that mix was setup.

 >   makefs foo.fs dvd1
 >   dd if=/dev/zero of=8.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img \
 > 	bs=10240 count=<size>
 >   mdconfig -a -t vnode -f 8.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img
 >   fdisk -BIq /dev/md0
 >   bsdlabel -B -w /dev/md0
 >   dd if=foo.fs of=/dev/md0a bs=10240 conv=sync
 >   mdconfig -d -u 0
 > 
 > The <size> number should be calculated to be two blocks larger than the
 > size of foo.fs so you've got room for round-up error and enough space
 > for the label.

Thanks!

Last night I manually worked through Luigi's make_freebsd_image() from 
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/FreeBSD/20081204-iso2flash on my 7.2-S 
of a few weeks ago, which is different: no fdisk, bsdlabel munging and 
later copying boot around it, seeming more complex than the above but 
seems to work, though its label has a: starting at sector 0, not 16(?)

[As an aside, man.cgi says that there's no makefs(8) at 7.2-STABLE: 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=makefs&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+7.2-stable&apropos=1&format=html 
which had me believing it until I checked, confirming the contrary]

 > After doing that I put the packages directory I'd used where it's
 > supposed to be (disc1), put the proper set of packages for the DVD into
 > the dvd1 directory, and then run the second pass of the release build to
 > generate the ISO images.

Thanks again; making some sense of my poring over src/release scripts.

cheers, Ian