Re: adding swap when expanding root filesystem

On 7 Nov 2022, at 11:52, bob prohaska wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 07, 2022 at 10:10:38AM -0600, Mike Karels wrote:
>> This question is not really arm-specific, but I couldn't think of a better
>> mailing list for it.
>>
>> There are peridic issues reported on small systems like Raspberry Pi
>> where people are running buildworld or poudriere and running out of
>> memory.  As the user gets no control over the disk layout when installing,
>> there is no option to add swap space on the install image.  I have added
>> swap space on a USB disk, but this is often not an option.  It occurred
>> to me that it might be reasonable to add swap space before expanding
>> the root filesystem if there is sufficient space.  I have a prototype,
>> and wondered if this is a good thing to do.  Granted, this will often
>> create swap on microSD, which is not optimal, but probably better than
>> nothing.
>>
>> The current prototype creates a swap partition which is 1/10 of the disk
>> if the disk is at least 15 GB and the initial root partition is no more
>> than 1/3 of the disk, but only up to 1.5x of physical memory.  I would
>> probably enable this by default, but provide a way to disable it via a
>> kenv variable and/or a variable in /etc/rc.conf.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
> For starters, is there any hope of making bsdinstall run from the
> microSD and installing FreeBSD via the traditional process on USB?
> No need to limit to USB, but that's a useful option for RPi and one
> option for many more devices. That treats microSD like a boot
> floppy.

I think that’s a completely different problem.  I suspect that this
is already possible, fetching packages over the net, but I don’t
know the incantation.  Ideally the packages would be local, but then
the image would be more like a CD-ROM.  It would be nice to have
a procedure documented though.

		Mike

> I haven't looked at bsdinstall in a very long time, so maybe the
> traditional installation process isn't as I remember it. ISTR it
> allowing selection of a boot device, a swap device and at least
> one /usr device. Maybe I'm confusing it with Jordan Hubbard's
> installer.
>
> Thanks for reading, and apologies if I'm hopelessly out of date.
>
> bob prohaska