MfsBSD: ISO file that create a working minimal installation of FreeBSD

I had the pleasure of working with the creator Martin Matuška at my first job in Vienna (Austria). As a junior sysadmin it was mindblowing what he could make FreeBSD do.

Back then I was dreaming of a day when ZFS will finally come to Linux without the fuse driver.

He even made an imaging system out of it so we could re-install windows Images from a small FreeBSD partition kind of like FOG does it just without PXE. Pretty smart dude.

PicoBSD - FreeBSD on a single 1.44 MB floppy disk. Just amazing. I ran the first cybercafé in our city here in Brazil with it. A 386 with 4 MB of RAM and a single 1.44 MB floppy disk as a router. Based on FreeBSD 2.something and a dedicated 9600 baud synchronous line. Win95 in kiosk mode for the café's customers, on bespoke wooden totems, with our own time billing software developed in Delphi 1.0. We also used KA9Q as a diskless router for other customers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoBSD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KA9Q

Also worth noting, while we're here, that there is a patch set from a GSoC project to integrate mfsBSD into the project's release(7) tooling:

- https://reviews.freebsd.org/D41704 - mfsBSD: Vendor import mfsBSD (mmatuska/mfsbsd@0da8061)

- https://reviews.freebsd.org/D41705 - release: Integrate mfsBSD image build targets into the release tool set

- https://reviews.freebsd.org/D41706 - release(7): Add entries for the new mfsBSD build targets

The homepage looks more active https://mfsbsd.vx.sk/

Very awesome!

I recently used this (via https://depenguin.me/) to install FreeBSD from a Linux Rescue Image on a Hetzner root server. Hetzner sadly discontinued the FreeBSD Rescue Image.

This installation method uses KVM to boot the mfsBSD image, giving the VM the actual hard drives to install on. The one thing that tripped me up was that the network interface presented to the VM did not use the same driver as the physical network interface. So the FreeBSD installation configured (in my case) `em0`, but once I rebooted into FreeBSD, the network interface was `igb0`.

The base install of FreeBSD is already extremely minimal. I don't really see the added value here? Is it for cloud transactional stuff?

Ps no criticism of FreeBSD by the way, I love it the way it is

Similar project here: https://github.com/michaeldexter/occambsd

Very good as a rescue cd to dump hdd data over network for recovery later