FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

[Mehmet Erol Sanliturk]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 10:41 PM, Garrett Cooper <gcooper at freebsd.org>wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 7:23 PM, Devin Teske <dteske at vicor.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Feb 22, 2011, at 12:57 PM, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> >
> >> On 2011-Feb-22 02:50:54 -0800, Devin Teske <dteske at vicor.com> wrote:
> >>> That's the operative word here ("supports"). Lord help us when that
> >>> changes to "requires" (that is to say, if/when the FreeBSD kernel
> >>> becomes legacy-free with respect to supporting fdisk/disklabel
> >>> partitioned disks).
> >>
> >> When that does come, it will probably be driven by BIOS and hardware
> >> vendors dropping support for MBR.  Current disks are at the upper
> >> limit of what MBR can be support (and that's after several revamps of
> >> MBR).  Since GPT already provides a superior feature set without MBR's
> >> limits, the next step will be to just drop MBR support.  And when it
> >> does come, FreeBSD needs to be ready with an installer that can cope
> >> with non-MBR disks.
>
> While I love a good discussion (and there have been a number of good
> points for either side on here), should we agree to switch the default
> over to bsdinstall, leave sysinstall in (lumps or no lumps), then over
> the period of the next 2~3 major (that amounts to 4~6 years) releases,
> and retire sysinstall to the happy hunting grounds? sysinstall didn't
> take up that much space on the release media I thought, and it might
> be doable to map both sets of media so that sysinstall can work in
> harmony on bsdinstall's release media?
>
> Preparing custom releases to use the sysinstall init_path isn't that
> bad, so it would at least give the legacy folks time to transition
> over while us guinea pigs burn in the new wax :)...
>
> Sound good?
>
> Thanks!
> -Garrett
>



Yes , very much .


My suggestion is to include the item

sysinstall

in BSD-Install by Nathan Whitehorn as an option in installation start up
menu .

In that way , existing installation works will be upward compatible with
bsdinstall .

My another suggestion is to move installation startup menu part into
/boot/install/ directory for each architecture and allow platform specific
installers by using common parts from common directories .

For example , in PC-based installations ( amd64 , i386 , ... ) PC-BSD
pc-sysinstall
will be usable from bsdinstall as an option at present .

In that form , the initial installation menu will be seen in PC environment
as follows :

 bsdinstall      ( by Nathan Whitehorn )
 pc-sysinstall ( by Kris Moore )
 sysinstall       ( by John Hubbard )


Thank you very much .


Mehmet Erol Sanliturk