BSDInstall: I want the bikeshed painted plaid
Nathan Whitehorn
nwhitehorn at freebsd.org
Wed Jan 5 14:56:58 UTC 2011
On 01/04/11 15:25, John Hixson wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 11:58 PM, Marco Steinbach
> <coco at executive-computing.de <mailto:coco at executive-computing.de>> wrote:
>
> John Hixson wrote on 02.01.2011 22:51:
>
> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Nathan Whitehorn
> <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org <mailto: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.
>
>
> I just subscribed to sysinstall at . I'd be happy to help starting out on
> the sparcs. I have no experience whatsoever on powermac, but it sounds
> fun ;-).
>
You can look in bsdinstall's partedit/partedit_${MACHINE}.c for how
various platforms need to be set up. APM on PPC is very similar to GPT,
and VTOC8 is a little bit of an oddball scheme because UFS partitions
need partcode on them. Bear in mind that PPC will very soon support
non-powermac platforms, so please avoid hardcoding any assumptions about
what "powerpc" requires. Similarly, several partition types (MBR, GPT)
require different setup on different platforms.
-Nathan
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