FAI Support for FreeBSD

[Jason Helfman]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 06:53:31PM +0100, Thomas Lange thus spake:
>>>>>> On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:34:16 -0800, Jason Helfman <jhelfman at e-e.com> said:
>
>    > I am interested if FAI can be modified to support FreeBSD and the ports
>    > infrastructure? I would be particularly interested in native support, if
>    > that can be done.
>
>Since I do not have any experiences with BSD, I need some information
>about differences between Linux and BSD. Here are several questions I have:
>
>- What type of disklabel does FreeBSD use?
It uses bsdlabel:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bsdlabel&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+8.0-RELEASE&format=html

>- Is the tool parted available?
No.

I believe other tools can be used for this, though.
bsdlabel
fdisk
newfs

>- Which bootloader can be used? grub?
Loader is used for this. Here is a link to the booting process:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/boot.html

>- FAI reads some information from /proc. We have to check, if BSD will
>  give FAI all needed information

What information is needed. There is no /proc filesystem in BSD.

>- Is there a tool for creating a minimal chroot environment? Debian
>  has debootstrap for that.

You can use "jails" for this. It is native to the FreeBSD OS.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/jails.html

>- Is there something similar to aufs-modules? 
I'm told this is a "unionfs," but I am not sure.
Here is some information I found on this assumption.
http://people.freebsd.org/~daichi/unionfs/


>If there's somthing like a live CD for FreeBSD, we will find similar techniques there.

Yes, there are livecd iso's for all released version of FreeBSD. There is
also a facility to make releases that is native to FreeBSD.
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/

>- Which command line tool installs packages? Does is resolve package dependencies?

pkg_add can add packages, and resolves dependencies.

>
>First, the major difficult part will be creating the nfsroot and
>booting and mounting a file system via NFS. I guess this is much different to Linux.

I'll help as much as I can :)

>--
>regards Thomas
>

Thanks!
Jason