Good article. A little bit confusing that most of the config told you hat to put in the config files, but the rc.conf configuration gave you a list of commands to run to modify the files. This bit in loader.conf makes me slightly nervous:
# Lets not wait on the boot loader
autoboot_delay=0
# I know that my root will never be on a USB disk, if it is we went sideways somewhere around albuquerque
hw.usb.no_boot_wait="1"
Saving a few seconds in boot time in exchange for making it harder to recover if you break everything doesn’t sound very sensible. The article suggests using ZFS on root, which means that you have ZFS boot environments automatically and you can roll-back any update from the loader screen if you create a new BE before you do the upgrade (this is really, really, good practice!). Unfortunately, with the autoboot delay set to 0, it’s almost impossible to then select the previous working configuration.
Good article. A little bit confusing that most of the config told you hat to put in the config files, but the rc.conf configuration gave you a list of commands to run to modify the files. This bit in loader.conf makes me slightly nervous:
Saving a few seconds in boot time in exchange for making it harder to recover if you break everything doesn’t sound very sensible. The article suggests using ZFS on root, which means that you have ZFS boot environments automatically and you can roll-back any update from the loader screen if you create a new BE before you do the upgrade (this is really, really, good practice!). Unfortunately, with the autoboot delay set to 0, it’s almost impossible to then select the previous working configuration.
I usually set
autoboot_delayto2which is quite reasonable for delay and usability.