Dangerously dedicated mode with FreeBSD 10.1

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 11/21/14 07:26, Warren Block wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Nov 2014, Rostislav Krasny wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've a server with FreeBSD 7.4-STABLE that uses two phisical disks in
>> a so called "dangerously dedicated mode". There is no other operating
>> system and no plan to install anything else but FreeBSD. So in my case
>> this is not dangerous mode at all.
>>
>> I want to upgrade it by installing FreeBSD 10.1 from scratch and I
>> want to use the dedicated disk mode again. How could I do that?
>>
>> If I understand it right the new bsdinstall(8) doesn't support the
>> dedicated disk mode, the old sysinstall(8) is already dead and the
>> only solution is a manual disk partitioning from shell. The 2.6.5.
>> Shell Mode Partitioning section of the Handbook is very terse about
>> that.
>
> If you are determined, it should be possible to select a bsdlabel-only 
> format with the Manual partitioning option in the menus, or enter 
> Shell mode on startup and create it with gpart or even bsdlabel.  That 
> said, I can't think of any advantages of using a bare bsdlable at 
> all.  With 10.1, GPT is available, supports large disks, and is easily 
> alignable.*

Right, just select "BSD" as the partition type.

> *: although it is reported that bsdinstall for 10.1 does not 
> automatically do 4K alignment.  But at least there are advantages to 
> using it as a partition scheme.

This has never been true. It does 4K alignment on disks with 4K physical 
sectors (no matter what the logical sector size is). If you have disks 
with larger sectors or preferred boundaries (e.g. a striped RAID), it 
will also align to that.
-Nathan