FreeBSD 12 is out. This is great! However I had the surprise to find that the automount feature didn’t work in KDE, probably also Gnome, XFCE and any other desktop environment that provide such a feature.

The culprit was easy to find, the Hardware Abstraction Layer has not yet updated to the peculiarities of the latest FreeBSD release.

See, when HAL tries to mount a vfat filesystem on FreeBSD, it adds by default the large option which according to FreeBSD 11.2 mount_msdosfs’s manpage provide support for very large files (>128GB). This option, however, was removed in FreeBSD 12. Thus automount fails.

To temporarily fix this, edit /usr/local/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-storage-methods.fdi. Then remove the large option in the vfat match for FreeBSD. That is:

  <match key="volume.fstype" string="vfat">
    <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:system.kernel.name" string="Linux">
      ...
  </match>
  <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:system.kernel.name" string="FreeBSD">
    ...
    <!-- <append key="volume.mount.valid_options" type="strlist">large</append> -->
  </match>

This was already reported in #221709.