The nosh package is now up to version 1.24 .
* http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh.html
*
https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2015-07-2015-09.html#The-nosh-Project
Minor items in this release include:
* A fix for BSD keyboard layout import, that makes both "duml" and
"ddia" be U+0308 for now. Technically, diaeresis and umlaut are
distinguishable in Unicode decomposed forms (using U+034F). But for
now, everything is simple unadorned combining diaeresis.
* A few more service bundles, for DBMail and for sudo (which in its
vanilla form puts its timestamp files in /var/lib instead of /var/run
and needs a cleanup service -- see Debian Bug #786555).
* Use of rtprio and idprio when converting system service units on
FreeBSD/PC-BSD.
* Improvements to the framebuffer video mode selection in user-space
virtual terminals for FreeBSD/PC-BSD. It now comes up in the same
display size as on Debian Linux on my test machines.
* Doco and other fixes from user feedback on version 1.23. (I've
already begun some further VirtualBox host adjustments, as we discussed,
for 1.25.)
There is one major item in this release.
PC-BSD 10.2
===========
Until now, I'd been testing on a PC-BSD system that had been upgraded,
with various contortions, from version 9. This was still using UFS
filesystems, listed in /etc/fstab; which the external configuration
import subsystem had been happily importing to native service bundles.
Over Christmastide I installed a PC-BSD 10.2 system from scratch,
discovering some interesting oddities. These included installation
failing if you tell it that you are in the United Kingdom using a U.K.
keyboard (PC-BSD Bug #12986); and the GRUB menu editor, as configured by
the installer, operating in a truly eye-stretching 46 column by 28 row
mode (by my count), and not displaying the underscore character correctly.
The important thing to know is that PC-BSD has for some time (at least
since 2013) been ZFS-only, as far as installation goes. (One can of
course mount other filesystem types after installation.) As Henry Ford
might have said "Any customer can install to any filesystem type that xe
likes, as long as it is ZFS.". The result is that if installing from
scratch one gets a whole load of ZFS datasets, and an empty (save for
/proc and swap) /etc/fstab file.
So the major push for version 1.24 has been to get the configuration
import system to deal with this, which it now does. It will create
mount services for all ZFS mounts, enable the ones that are "on", give
them an inter-service ordering, and deal with the special-casing for the
root (which the installer, oddly, marks as not automatically mounted,
even though it of course is).
Alongside this, a large chunk of the remaining NetBSD rc.d services,
from the on-going project to entirely replace them, have been crossed
off the list. These include mfs for /tmp, static networking and static
ARP, pefs, serial port BPS and framing setup, ppp, rfcomm_pppd,
persistent "entropy" for the randomness subsystem, and ipfw. The
progress of this work has been open from the start, and you can follow
along on the roadmap WWW page. Indeed, you can even join in, if you can
convert any of the remaining few items.
There's more work to be done. But I now have ZFS-only PC-BSD 10.2
running nosh system-managed and service-managed.
Some notes for those eager to follow:
* Yes; I'm working on a pcdm service. No; it doesn't help that it's
undocumented. Yes; that hoopla and palaver with forked subshells and
multiple while loops calling sleep is exactly the sort of thing that
proper service management is intended to obviate.
* If you have problems with devd, stale nologin from previous boots, and
other things that use /var/run, it's because the convert_varrun service
isn't enabled and your system has not been thus or otherwise migrated to
/run. This will be properly enabled by a preset in the next version.
Enable it and reboot. Or just start it and reboot. Or just boot into
rescue mode and turn /var/run into a symbolic link to /run yourself.
* No; the nosh-run-system-manager package doesn't work properly on
PC-BSD, as it does on vanilla FreeBSD. PC-BSD 10.2 doesn't use the
FreeBSD boot loader, like my old upgraded installation of PC-BSD 9 did.
It uses GRUB. The PC-BSD people apparently plan to get rid of GRUB in
the future, and use the FreeBSD loader once more. So this problem goes
away when GRUB does. (-: In the meantime, use 'set
kFreeBSD.init_path="/sbin/service-manager"' in the GRUB configuration.
* The root-resizing subsystem that was new to FreeBSD version 10 still
needs conversion. But ironically it doesn't work on PC-BSD 10.2 in the
first place. It can only grow UFS volumes, and PC-BSD's root is not a
UFS volume.
