Well, I figured out why my attempt to create a LiveCD for FreeBSD was dying: init was compiled with shared libraries, and something was apparently screwy. I replaced it with a version of init which was statically linked, and then found out that all my other binaries were also still dynamically linked, and they failed too, but when I added /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 to the boot image, all was well and I was able to successfully boot my miniaturized, stripped down version of FreeBSD without any further difficulty.

When I’ve created some better scripts to generate these images, I’ll post a link to the resulting toy .iso file.