There used to be a way to install FreeBSD through a PXE bootloader. That bootloader is still present in the ISO and while the article itself has disappeared (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/pxe/article.html), I assume that this capability was not lost in the 9.x series. PXE-based installs do not work out of the box in 9.1 anymore, a regression from 8.1 at the very least. Fix: As you see in the above instructions, the user needed to comment out the following line in /etc/fstab: /dev/iso9660/FREEBSD_INSTALL / cd9660 ro 0 0 ... otherwise the boot fails. Having to modify that file means we need to duplicate all those files instead of being able to simply mount the ISO as a filesystem and offer it over NFS... But even then, this seems just like a crude workaround to a wider problem: in 8.1, the .ISO could be loaded directly into memory and boot properly through a local memory filesystem. That way, the .iso could be loaded directly from syslinux, for example with pxelinux and memdisk: LABEL FreeBSD-8.1-i386 MENU LABEL FreeBSD 8.1 i386 kernel memdisk append initrd=freebsd/FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso iso raw This doesn't work in 9.1 anymore, probably because the mfsroot file seems to be gone from 9.1. All this makes PXE-based FreeBSD deployments *much* harder and less attractive than before, because we need to setup a separate NFS server and hack at the files. How-To-Repeat: Follow those instructions: http://freebsd.so14k.com/freebsd9_pxe.shtml
After further inspection, this may be the same bug as the rather short misc/169919. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=misc/169919 A. -- Jesus died for his own sins, not mine. - CRASS, 1978
Improvements to this would be really helpful.
For bugs matching the following conditions: - Status == In Progress - Assignee == "bugs@FreeBSD.org" - Last Modified Year <= 2017 Do - Set Status to "Open"
I've made a patch for this https://reviews.freebsd.org/D27349 which enables booting from the installer images with memdisk.