BSDInstall: I want the bikeshed painted plaid

Marco Steinbach coco at executive-computing.de
Tue Jan 4 08:16:23 UTC 2011


John Hixson wrote on 02.01.2011 22:51:
> 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.

I have PowerMacs (G3/G4) and Netras/Ultras (T1 105, U10, U5) at my 
discretion.  I've never installed FreeBSD on any of them, but would be 
willing to give it a shot.

I can provide serial console access to the Sparcs, but the PowerMacs 
supposedly need "hands on", which I can also provide.

If there's interest, I humbly suggest discussing further details on the 
course of action at sysinstall@, to which I just subscribed.

MfG CoCo



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