Installer fails with "out of swap space" when installing ZFS-on-root with less then 4 GB mem (10.0-RC4)

[Craig Rodrigues]

On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 5:27 PM, Mark Martinec
<Mark.Martinec+freebsd at ijs.si>wrote:

> I was playing with bhyve on 10.0-RC4, trying to install another 10.0-RC4
> into
> a 16 GB ZFS volume using the network installation DVD. Mostly kept
> defaults,
> except that I chose a ZFS-on-root installation. The amd64 host was given 1
> GB
> of RAM on the first attempt, but failed. It fails on 2 GB RAM too, but
> succeeds
> when given 4 GB of RAM.
>


How far did you get with this?  If you use BHyve to boot FreeBSD,
the loader which is used is in /usr/src/sys/boot/userboot , and
this loader does not support a complete ZFS-only install.
I recently tried to do this, and the install worked (with 4G of RAM),
but when I tried to reboot the BHyve VM, the VM did not boot.

If you look at: https://admbugs.freebsd.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428#c7

you will see I had to use a variation of these steps:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/UFSBoot

where the /boot directory which contained the kernel and loader was on a
UFS partition,
but everything else was on ZFS.  That's the only way I could get the BHyve
VM to boot, with userboot.

--
Craig