BSDInstall: I want the bikeshed painted plaid

John Hixson jhixson at gmail.com
Sun Jan 2 22:19:08 UTC 2011


On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org>wrote:

>
> I spent a bunch of time looking at pc-sysinstall before starting to work on
> this. The major problem for non-x86 systems is that it heavily assumes that
> your disks are either MBR+bsdlabel or GPT. If you have anything different
> (APM, VTOC8, or even a raw bsdlabel or MBR installation on x86), it breaks
> in strange and fascinating ways due to a random mixture of if (scheme ==
> MBR) else and if (scheme == GPT) else in the backend. Some of these are
> easily fixed, but it looked quite difficult to root out all of the places
> this assumption is made, not to mention teaching it about various styles of
> boot code, that the same partitioning scheme may need to be set up different
> ways on different architectures, etc. txt-sysinstall also segfaults when you
> try to run it on powerpc at the moment, though that is likely a simple bug
> and I didn't look into it in detail.
>
> What I intended with bsdinstall is to have something simple, flexible, and
> easily maintained that works immediately on all platforms and will be ready
> for 9.0 for sure. If pc-sysinstall materializes before then, or after then,
> and people like it better, I'm more than happy to get out of the way; this
> is the reason the wiki page is titled "Stopgap Installer". In the interim, I
> hoped to at least start laying out the hammer and nails next to sysinstall's
> coffin.
> -Nathan
>
>
I would be more than happy to help out with making pc-sysinstall work on
non-x86 systems, however I don't have access to any. Do any of you have
hardware that could possibly be used by interested parties? I'm sure all the
work that's gone into bsdinstall could be used in pc-sysinstall or vice
versa.

- John


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