DO disabling journaling is a big deal.

What else has DO disabled and/or modified from a vanilla install?

DO modifies a lot of stuff on vanillas installs. They're one of the only providers I know of that removes the swap partition.

Where does DO document all of the modifications they make to a vanilla FreeBSD install?

I just use Vultr and install from a FreeBSD downloaded ISO. No modifications to the base install at all and works as expected.

DO have screwed something up with their configuration if they need to make so many changes to make it work. No other VPS provider I have used that support FreeBSD (or OpenBSD for that matter) require any changes to the default install.

On UFS soft-updates have a lower overhead than soft-updates with metadata journaling. The downside of soft-updates without journaling is that it requires a background fsck to recover leaked space after unclean shutdowns. I prefer UFS2 SU (not SU+J) on FreeBSD for small systems, because SU+J is incompatible with UFS snapshots.

> required to disable journaling on the disk

Shouldn't this make it much faster as the FS no longer maintains a journal?

Why did journaling interfere with automatic backups?

journaling generally interferes with dump(8). It seems odd that they would be using dump to do backups though, since they are virtualizing the OS.

The parent link to gjournal is weird too, since gjournal is not the same as softupdates w/journaling (SU+J). It makes me wonder if they actually disabled softupdates too.

I found a random post[1] about issues (unmapped io?) running i386 freebsd with su+j in virtualbox (apparently a virtualbox bug[2]).

[1]: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-10-i386-data-corr...

[2]: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2013-Nov...

That deserves an explanation - you can backup non-ext2 linux partitions, surely? What have I misunderstood?

So I enabled Journaling and that brought it up to 30MB/sec. Still a substantial difference vs 216MB/sec for Linux.. Something with the D.O. KVM HOST setup needs to be tweaked a bit - 30MB/sec is pretty poor quality disk throughput for SSD attached storage.

There is no way to boot into single user mode for now (or at least instructions provided aren't working).

And the reason was invalid /boot/loader.conf:

console="vidconsole,comconsole" autoboot_delay="10" console="comconsole,vidconsole" autoboot_delay="1"

Second console actually disables access from web console access, which is fatal.

Autoboot is not critical, although default to 3 sec should work much better for opportunity to change boot options from web console.

This got apparently fixed, in my "ams3" instance I've had to issues getting web console to work (needed to "tunefs -n enable /")

This should be done by default on droplets which do not have backups enabled.