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A* Microgrid

Setup for a FreeBSD laptop

Purpose

Section titled “Purpose”

This document describes the setup for a FreeBSD PC or Laptop for use within the A* project. In particular:

  1. How to install it?
  2. Why even use FreeBSD.
  3. Current status

Current Status

Section titled “Current Status”

Phil is using it as for his laptop which is the current development platform for most work. The systems benefits include:

  1. It uses ZFS as its default file system which has benefits including:
  • It can do data de duplication, i.e. if you have repetitive data it only keeps one version. This is cool since Phil as a tendency to keep backup disks and deduplicating in the file system is great.
  • Various reliability features.
  • Snapshots, …
  1. Its different from the a-star-microgrid.com and the green sentinel which run on OpenBSD at least for now. 3.The ports collection is an interesting comparision with OpenBSD since its much larger.

Disadvantages include:

  1. It takes a while to configure all devices.
  2. Web browser implementations seem problematic.
  3. X11 and sound requires more work.

What about SBOM, conformance, etc.

Section titled “What about SBOM, conformance, etc.”

See the <freebsd.org> but there are projects doing this and of course A* does it all internally. See https://a-star-microgrid.com/a-team/COMPONENTS/platform-security-overview for details.

Why even use FreeBSD

Section titled “Why even use FreeBSD”

See the platform-comparision-security for details but in general FreeBSD is:

  1. Diversity is our strength from OpenBSD which provides a requirement for a complete system attack to break both systems.
  2. Provides a good platform for testing unix popularity.
  3. Ubuntu has significant issues with snaps which has taken that out of the mix noting that was Phils previous OS.

Howto

Section titled “Howto”
  1. Backup the machine, all the data is in the gun safe in Darwin on two disks in a black Pelic Case. There are two USB thumb drives with FreeBSD and OpenBSD on them or download them,
  2. Boot into the BIOS usin F2.
  3. Disable BIOS boot security.
  4. Turn off hyperthreading, etc in BIOS
  5. Set boot order so the USB boots.
  6. Do the usual BSD install process but add 2GiB of swap space in case you build from ports.
  7. Includes the ports collection.

Then you need to setup X etc.

TODO: once Phils laptop is tested setup will be copied into this component.