>Right until there is an update or anything and a bootloader or one of its required files gets written past the 8GB barrier, rendering your system unbootable.

I do not fully understand this. Can you add specifics ? To me the article indicates he used a small root partition. Or did I miss something ?

A little hint for people (like me) who have a separate partition for /usr, /var, /tmp and /home due to cgd encryption or other reasons. If using wireless, you may need this in /etc/rc.conf to force a mount before daemons kick off. In my case, without this wireless breaks.

critical_filesystems_local="/var /usr /tmp"