[SOLVED] Re: labelling root file system (RELENG_8)

Josh Carroll josh.carroll at gmail.com
Wed Jun 8 20:37:12 UTC 2011


>> That would mean the only time a
>> person can use tunefs on a root filesystem is when they either do it
>> manually during the FreeBSD installation (adding "-t" to the list of
>> newfs flags in the filesystem creation UI), or if they boot off of some
>> other medium (USB flash drive, CD, PXE, etc.).
>
> Or when your root fs is mounted r/o, which is not as bad as what you listed above.

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but in my experience, at least with
glabel, the label will not stick even if you have the root fs mounted
ro. I have had to boot from an alternative media (boot cd, alternate
root fs, etc) in order to create a label for the root fs with glabel.
To be specific, I'm talking about the "automatic" labels created with
glabel label <name> <dev>.

I just tested this again in a VM, and sure enough if I boot single
user mode but use ad0s1a as the ro root file system during single user
mode, it still doesn't stick and upon reboot I don't have a /dev/label
entry. Here is the exact sequence I used:

1. boot single user with the default root fs (ad0s1a).
2. leave / mounted read only
3. glabel label -v root ad0s1a   # reports successful addition of metadata
4. /dev/label/root exists as expected
5. reboot
6. /dev/label/root does not exist

If I boot from a boot cd for example and do it from there, it works
fine. So it seems (at least for glabel) that you can't have the fs
mounted at all when adding a glabel.

If that's the expected behavior, perhaps we can add a mention of this
in the man page(s)? Otherwise, I'm curious what I'm doing wrong and
how I can get it to stick and still not need a boot CD/etc.

Thanks,
Josh


More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list