Installing FreeBSD-15 directly on an SSD, or "wait this 2007 era AMD K8 1RU server doesn't boot from USB flash?"

I .. ok let's not talk about why I'm putting freebsd-15 on an old K8 era box. (it's for network hijinx testing with old realtek PCI cards, don't ask.)

Anyway it's an award BIOS from 2007 that has the following USB options:

• USB FDD
• USB ZIP
• USB CD-ROM

.. and doesn't like whatever FreeBSD is doing to the USB flash drives these days.

Anyway, that meant I needed to figure out how to bootstrap FreeBSD directly onto an SSD.

First up, creating partitions:

# gpart create -s mbr da0
# gpart bootcode -b /boot/boot0 da0


# gpart add -t freebsd da0
# gpart set -a active -i 1 da0

# gpart create -s bsd da0s1
# gpart bootcode -b /boot/boot da0s1

Then, filesystems

# gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -s 230g da0s1
# gpart add -t freebsd-swap -s 4g da0s1

Then, newfs w/ FFS journaling:

 # newfs -j  da0s1a

Then mounting it:

# mount /dev/da0s1a /mnt

Then, bootstrapping from my local pkgbase repo (see https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase for more info): 

# pkg --rootdir /mnt --repository FreeBSD-base --glob '*'

Which did a great job of bootstrapping it.

Then, I rebooted it, and discovered I needed /etc/fstab, so I did some manual stuff to boot it into single user mode and get it working.

 

Anyway, that was a fun trip down 2007 era hardware lane, and I found some bugs in ethernet drivers that use miibus (see kern/286530 - https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=286530 - for more info.)