FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 02/19/11 03:34, grarpamp wrote:
> Sysinstall is fine, as I'm sure any replacement will be. So I'll
> just note a few things I'd like to see in any such replacement...
>
> 1 - I used install.cfg's on floppies to clone systems, a lot. Hands
> on the box were needed with that. Operators skills were in question,
> so having them use the dialog menus properly was a pain and often
> resulted in non-zeroed disk or half built systems. And though all
> else was cloned, it needed a separate<host>.cfg for each box due
> to:
>
> fqdn, gateway, ip/mask
> interface - sometimes changed
> root disk - sometimes changed
>
> Would have killed for a simple console shell script to ask those
> questions of the operator, per machine.
>
> 2 - Being able to skip, replace, or prefix/suffix each stage of
> whatever the installer would do with a shell script (ala: distSetCustom
> local) would be cool.
>
> 3 - Options to dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[x] bs=1m, where x are any
> boot sectors, drives, slices, partitions, labels, etc that would
> otherwise be blown away but not fully wiped beforehand.
>
>
> And a request for some remaining bugs to be fixed, implemented anew
> or figured out...
>
> 1 - Setting debug=yes was great[a], up until you tried to get that
> resultant file off the system or view it. Due to the way things
> were mounted with mfsroot and the alt-f4 shell being separate, I
> never did figure out how to do that.
>
> [a] - only when calling /stand/sysinstall from your development box
> to test your install.cfg, and the install process. Not when actually
> installing a box.
>
> 2 - mediaClose - didn't work right. I couldn't get the base
> distribution bits from one ftp server, and the local distribution
> bits from another.
>
>
> And in general, I'll cheer for whichever camps are doing...
> As opposed to mfsroot, boot a stripped kernel, on real filesystem,
> with init to shell to installer.
> and installroot things from there.
> Some sort of plaintext backend that can read a config.
> Pluggable frontends, at minimum 80x25 console shell, then
> dialog/web/xorg/whatever.
> Network boot, retrieve config via net, etc.
>
> It would be cool to have an 'installer build' config option set
> available during buildworld too. Much like you can configure crunchgen
> to customize the crunch, you could customize certain parts of how
> you wanted the installer to work. Particularly for things that might
> take up space, what it thinks are its first places to get input,
> boot from, display, where to find its config while blind, etc.
> And a stripped buildworld kernel config for use with the installer.
> Call it just more permutations on the liveCD concept.
>

You've basically described how bsdinstall (and, largely, pc-sysinstall) 
works in this mail. The zeroing thing would have to be done by hand 
(e.g. from the installer script or a shell), and there is currently no 
built-in fetch a configuration from the network option. The 'installer 
build' option is also something you have to do by hand, although it is 
not complicated. Since the installation process is controlled by a shell 
script, any of these things would be easy to add. Since we have several 
months yet to add them before the release, patches are very welcome.
-Nathan