Marie HeleneCan a #FreeBSD #ZFS pool function without any drives? Let's find out!
blog: https://savagedlight.me/2019/06/09/freebsd-zfs-without-drives/
direct vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDbAFFnknJo
Romain Tartière@mhka I always wanted live-systems to rely on this kind of mechanism…
This way, you:
Boot on the live-cd / live-usb-stick;
Use the product, be happy, decide to keep it;
Run the installation process (which does what you show);
Remove the device you booted from to free the CD-ROM drive / USB port;
All work you did in the live system is *not* lost;
All customization you did in the live system is *not* lost;
No need to reboot.
Chris 
@smortex @mhka YES! To all those things! I haven't watched the video/website yet, but my guess with something like dtrace you can replace the running live system with the installed system without rebooting. And the installer could be made smarter by also changing everything you've changed as well. I don't understand why a live system on a USB isn't just a completely installed system to begin with? Is it the legacy from the live *CD* era?
@RyuKurisu @smortex I'm not sure how dtrace would factor into this, but for the "Live USB stick" thing, do what I did in the video with a few alterations:
1) boot off of the USB sticks pool
2) replace the USB block device with the malloc-backed block device
3) Let the user do their thing!
4) Once the user hits install, give them a wizard for configuring the zpools layout, create a snapshot of the existing pool and zfs send | recv it.
5) Reboot into the newly installed system
1) boot off of the USB sticks pool
2) replace the USB block device with the malloc-backed block device
3) Let the user do their thing!
4) Once the user hits install, give them a wizard for configuring the zpools layout, create a snapshot of the existing pool and zfs send | recv it.
5) Reboot into the newly installed system