Unofficial NanoBSD technical resources

Here are a list of docs and tutorials about NanoBSD:

• Introduction to NanoBSD : Official presentation page on FreeBSD website
• Building a FreeBSD Appliance With NanoBSD (pdf) : Presentation during the BSD Can 2006
• NanoBSD man page : The man page
• Gitoyen NanoBSD quagga router (french only) : One of the most close project to this, with a very smart idea of manage configuration by an external svn server and most interressing: A patch for adding ports compilation support

It's a shell script (/usr/src/tools/tools/nanobsd/) that generate embedded FreeBSD image disk.

After using NanoBSD, you will found a full disk image (_.disk.full) that contains 2 partitions (p1 and p2) (both copy of _.disk.image file). The file _.disk.image is the light FreeBSD filesystem (in diskless mode). Using 2 partitions permit to use a simple and safe upgrading process: The new _.disk.image file is copied over the non-active partition, and the bootloader is modified for boot on the non-active partition at the next boot. There are the scripts updatep1 and updatep2 for this task.

NanoBSD manage flash device and prevent fsck by mounting the filesystem read-only. For saving configuration file, you need to copy /etc into /conf: There is the script save_cfg for this task.

Here are the command line options of NanoBSD:

Usage: $0 [-bikqvw] [-c config_file]
  -b      suppress builds (both kernel and world)
  -i      suppress disk image build
  -k      suppress buildkernel
  -n      add -DNO_CLEAN to buildworld, buildkernel, etc
  -q      make output more quite
  -v      make output more verbose
  -w      suppress buildworld
  -c      specify config file
  -h      Display usage information.

Here are the functions steps:

1. clean_build
2. make_conf_build
3. build_world
4. build_kernel
5. clean_world
6. make_conf_install
7. install_world
8. install_etc
9. setup_nanobsd_etc
10. install_kernel
11. run_customize
12. setup_nanobsd
13. prune_usr
14. run_late_customize
15. create_${NANO_ARCH}_diskimage
16. last_orders

All this patchs were wrote for NanoBSD included in FreeBSD 8.1-Release.

This very small patch permit to generate NanoBSD amd64 image.

This patch was proposed to be added into the official NanoBSD the Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:51:53 GMT and was included in FreeBSD 8.1.

The image of NanoBSD hardcode the device type use for mounting the root filesystem:

• ad0 for the first ATA device
• da0 for the first SCSI device (used for USB key)

This mean, that a “ad0-nanobsd” image can't be installed on a USB key: It will not correctly boot (because the fstab will indicate the root filesystem on the ad0 drive, but when booting from a USB key, it's on da0).

The pfSense team meet the same problem, and Scott Ullrich give me this big advice: Use label in your fstab for avoiding this problem!

Then, here is the patch, and the new update script (merged updatep1 and updatep2 nanoBSD script):

• nanobsd.glabel.patch
• New update script that support glabel

This patch was proposed to be added into NanoBSD on the FreeBSD-embedded mailing-list the Sun Jul 5 22:12:38 UTC 2009, and a modified version is committed in -current.

This patches is an improvement of the method used by Gitoyen NanoBSD router.

It replaces the installation of package by compiling ports during NanoBSD image build: This permit to add ports during build process of NanoBSD images.

This patch support cross-compilation i386 ports from an amd64 release.

You can found this patches as the function add_port () in the BSDRP nano configuration file.

NanoBSD generate a mtree reference file, but for system security audit the default nanoBSD mtree file didn't contain enough parameters

This patch add sha256digest to mtree function of nanoBSD:

nanobsd.mtree.patch

This patch is to be used with the nanobsd glabel patch:

nanobsd.sparc64.patch

Actual State: Commenting net/bird and net/openlldp permit to build the sparc64 BSDRP image, but the resulting image don't accept to login (Generate a “__sparc_utrap: fatal illegal instruction”).

This patch permit to generate NanoBSD arm image: It's came from the nanobsd/gateworks exemples.

nanobsd.arm.patch