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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