Real Device with BHyve

[Michael Gmelin]

On Fri, 03 Jan 2014 09:43:24 -0800
Peter Grehan <grehan at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Hi Andrea,
> > Well, the machine starts ok but when the "child" FreeBSD starts
> > installation something strange happens. When I get to the
> > partitioning screen I can see the device avaiable as /dev/vtdb0
> > with the correct size and such. I choose autopartitioning, the
> > installer writes the partition table but when it start to
> > write /dev/vtdb0p2 a very cryptic error appears about being unable
> > to write - sorry, did not write it down.
> >
> > The installer then stops.
> >
> > If I do a fdisk /dev/vtdb0 in the VM I can see the GPT partition
> > being there. If I do a fdisk /dev/da2 on the host machine, I can
> > see the GPT partition as well, but the VM just doesn't want to
> > write on it.
> >
> > I even tried changing kern.geom.debugflags=16 as I thought the host
> > machine could be locking somehow the drive, but that didn't seem to
> > make any difference. I know it was a lame check but I was out of
> > ideas.
> >
> > So I just wanted to understand if such a scenario is supposed to be
> > supported....
> 
>   It is. Been a while since I've done this but will try a repro.
> Other folk have supported success using zvols so I'd assumed it was
> working.

If it helps, I had the same problem using zvol as well (booting the
installer and install on the "raw" device) on 10-CURRENT from mid 2013.

I didn't try with a more recent release. I ended up installing FreeBSD
from the outside (create partitions and untar base.txz, kernel.txz etc.
- afaik the same thing the Dexter's vm0 script does now) and could then
boot into it just fine.

-- 
Michael Gmelin