Is FreeNAS a "live" system? Install custom packages on FreeNAS

Knogle

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Jan 25, 2014
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Ahoy friends.
My USB device is quite slow, so i got the following question.
Is FreeNAS like a live system? Loading the system from the slow USB device into RAM, in order to run from RAM? Or does it run live from the USB stick? If so, is there a way to get it running and loading into RAM to improve I/O performance in my case?

I also would like to make changes permanent. So i installed a few packages using pkg, and i'd like to make these changes permanent. Is there a way to do so?
I have to use some custom scripts in order to get my custom BMC/IPMI working.
 

Samuel Tai

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No, FreeNAS is not a live system as on Linux. A live system runs from a RAM disk. FreeNAS actually runs from the boot pool.
 

danb35

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So i installed a few packages using pkg, and i'd like to make these changes permanent. Is there a way to do so?
No.
 
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A live system runs from a RAM disk. FreeNAS actually runs from the boot pool.

I was under the assumption that while FreeNAS does run from the boot pool (be it physical USB, SSD, HDD, or mirror vdev), most of the system is loaded to RAM, and thus very few read/write operations occur to and from the boot pool. Even less if your system-dataset and syslogs are written to a different pool.

* My boot pool is a mirror vdev of two identical 32GB USB 3.0 sticks, and I notice no performance issues at all. My system-dataset and syslogs live on a separate pool.
 

sretalla

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I was under the assumption that while FreeNAS does run from the boot pool (be it physical USB, SSD, HDD, or mirror vdev), most of the system is loaded to RAM, and thus very few read/write operations occur to and from the boot pool
That was changed between 9.3 and 9.10. It runs from the media now, not RAM, and has done for a long time.
 

danb35

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That was changed between 9.3 and 9.10.
The change you're thinking of happened in 9.3, not from 9.3 to 9.10, but I don't think you're understanding what Winnie is saying. Yes, the boot pool is a live ZFS pool, and the OS runs from that pool rather than a RAMdisk (as was the case with 9.2 and prior). However, ZFS caching means that most of the OS is going to live in RAM most of the time; there still shouldn't be much I/O to the boot device(s). But definitely more than there would have been under 9.2 and earlier.
 
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