I had an opportunity at work to build up a new machine to do our FreeBSD builds at work this quarter and wanted to see how far I could take ZFS on high end OEM hardware. After evaluating HP and Dell gear, I settled on the Dell r720xd as my platform to move forward.  Primarily, […]

Sandybridge/Ivybridge/Haswell boxes take upwards of 10 minutes to just GET TO THE BOOT LOADER now.  When I want to get a box into single user, and not miss the loader prompt when using FreeBSD: nextboot -o “-s” -k kernel ZFS based systems will emit a terrifying warning of: WARNING: loader(8) has only R/O support for […]

Migrating a system from its UFS installation to a new shiny ZFS pool: cd / && tar –exclude=zroot/ –exclude=dev/ –exclude=proc/ -cvf – * | ( cd /zroot; tar xfp – )

Like the subtitle says, these should be obvious, but I’m forever looking them up. #1:  Find files in a perforce checkout that are not checked in or are modified: for file in `p4 diff -f -sa`; do p4 diff -f $file; done #2 Crosscompile FreeBSDi386 on amd64, its stupid simple, but I can never remember: […]

Spent some time this week screwing around with the “serial” port on my laptop.  Serial consoles are one of those things that you seem to always need when doing o/s development.  Its the only reliable way to get debugging information and on PC architectures, its really the best way to find and resolve serious problems […]