Softupdates Bug on Multilingual Installer

Multilingual Installer of 4.6.2-RELEASE prior to the version 20020917 has a bug related to softupdates. Even if you select softupdates for non-root partition in disklabel editor (default behavior), sysinstall does not enable softupdates on these partitions. This degrades filesystem performance.

Workaround/Solution

Please use installer newer than version 20020917 (latest version: boot.flp, kern.flp, mfsroot.flp).

If you've already installed FreeBSD with the older version, you can use this script (ftp://daemon.jp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-jp/I18N-flp/4.6.2-RELEASE/fix-soft.pl) to enable softupdates on installed system. This script generates a script file /root/soft.sh. It enables softupdates on all non-root partitions. You can execute this script only in single-user mode.

# fetch ftp://daemon.jp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-jp/I18N-flp/4.6.2-RELEASE/fix-soft.pl
Receiving fix-soft.pl (631 bytes): 100%
631 bytes transferred in 0.0 seconds (21.25 kBps)
# perl fix-soft.pl
# cat /root/soft.sh
#!/bin/sh
#Enable softupdates for /dev/da0s1g (/home)
tunefs -n enable da0s1g
#Enable softupdates for /dev/da0s1e (/tmp)
tunefs -n enable da0s1e
#Enable softupdates for /dev/da0s1f (/usr)
tunefs -n enable da0s1f
#Enable softupdates for /dev/da0s1h (/var)
tunefs -n enable da0s1h

If /root/soft.sh has no problem, reboot the system into single-user mode (boot -s), execute /root/soft.sh, and type Ctrl-D (turns into multi-user mode).


Tatsumi Hosokawa
hosokawa@jp.FreeBSD.org