EDIT: Anish Gupta did the work that Neel Natu commited. Thanks Anish!
I had previously built images using makefs and mkimg for a CF card for use in another machine, so being able to build images to use with bhyve makes sense.
First, you need to make sure that you have a complete source check out along with a completed buildworld and buildkernel. Then follow these steps:
- Install world and distribution into a temporary directory using the NO_ROOT option:
make installworld DESTDIR=<tmpdir> -DDB_FROM_SRC -DNO_ROOT
make distribution DESTDIR=<tmpdir> -DDB_FROM_SRC -DNO_ROOT
This preps everything with the defaults as necessary. - Install a kernel either into a different directory (I do this) or into the same directory above:
make installkernel DESTDIR=<tmpkerndir> -DNO_ROOT KERNCONF=<conf> - Make a directory with your custom configuration files. The basics are /etc/rc.conf and /etc/fstab and you might want /firstboot on there too. You will also need a METALOG file which contains the permissions for the files. This is just a standard mtree file, so you could use mtree to generate this instead of creating it by hand. The file contents are below.
- Build the ufs image using the makeroot.sh script in the src tree at tools/tools/makeroot/makeroot.sh:
/usr/src/tools/tools/makeroot/makeroot.sh -e <custdir>/METALOG -e <tmpkerndir>/METALOG -p <tmpdir>/etc/master.passwd -s 2g ufs.img root - Build the disc image:
mkimg -s gpt -b <tmpdir>/boot/pmbr -p freebsd-boot:=<tmpdir>/boot/gptboot -p freebsd-swap::1G -p freebsd-ufs:=ufs.img -o disc.img - Run the image:
sh /usr/share/examples/bhyve/vmrun.sh -d disc.img vm0
There you have it. Besides running the image, all the other steps can be done as a normal user w/o root access.
EDIT: You also might want to include an /entropy file (populated with 4k from /dev/random) in your custom directory so that the image has a good seed for entropy at first boot for things such as sshd key generation.
File contents:
- /etc/fstab:
/dev/vtbd0p3 / ufs rw 1 1 - Custom METALOG:#mtree 2.0
./etc/rc.conf type=file uname=root gname=wheel mode=0644
./etc/fstab type=file uname=root gname=wheel mode=0644
./firstboot type=file uname=root gname=wheel mode=0644