Install Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on a FreeBSD Jail with ZFS

Once we have installed and updated a FreeBSD 9 system, the next step is to provide it with apps to make it a useful system.

In recent years, I have been working on Solaris 10 systems, where services had in production were encapsulated in Solaris Containers. Given my recent interest in FreeBSD seems natural to attempt to play a similar execution environment, which gave me such good results in the past. 

Moreover, it seems interesting the possibility to include the ability to run Linux applications and having a jail specifically intended for that purpose. 

In this case, instead of installing a Jail with the  FreeBSD native  userland, we will install Debian GNU/kFreeBSD that provides an alternative userland for FreeBSD 9.

Updating FreeBSD 9 with freebsd-update and beadm

In my previous post I described how Install FreeBSD 9 with root on ZFS with support for beadm, now my purpose is to show the advantages of this configuration to deal with tasks so committed like operating system updates. 

Install GRUB2 on GPT disk with dedicated partition

When you plan to setting up an x86 computer from scratch, should be considered the following issues:

• Whats the computer role?
• it support  UEFI BIOS?
• Will be dedicated to a single operating system, or is intended to host multiple OSs?
• Which bootloader is intended to install?.
• How to allocate disk space?.
  
  

In my last laptop for testing, I configured  a GPT partitioned disk with homogeneous partitions sizes and then have installed GRUB2 as independent  bootloader. This configuration allows me great flexibility in allocating storage space and isolates the different S.Os installed.

The choice of GRUB2 is almost obvious, is the default bootloader for a lot of Linux distributions. It  reads  most  file systems, it can boot directly almost all OSs, or  chainloading with another bootloader to boot the OS -the last is my preferred option-.

 

Next, we will review the implementation process I have done.