FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 02/18/11 22:11, Shawn Webb wrote:
>> There are many reasons for this, and none of them are selfish (although it
>> remains possible to drum-up some selfish reason, all of the reasons behind
>> our motivation are in-fact unselfish). Truth-be-told, I welcome the
>> replacement of sysinstall but am very wary that ANY replacement will be able
>> to exactly replicate the hardware compatibility that sysinstall currently
>> enjoys. I do indeed envision a great celebration as FreeBSD-9 bucks
>> sysinstall but also at the same time have nightmares of receiving waves of
>> calls from people having trouble (for example) "installing FreeBSD-9 on
>> their AMD K6 based system, circa long-long-ago in a universe far-far-away."
>> (yes, we do have data centers running that very equipment with uptime in the
>> 1,000's of days).
>>
> I'm sure I'm not fully aware of the situation at your data center, but would
> systems that have 1,000+ day uptimes be candidates for upgrade to FreeBSD 9?
> It seems that if a system has that kind of uptime, it's a high priority
> server and uptime needs to be maintained.
>
> Maybe it would be possible to have both sysinstall and bsdinstall on the
> same install medium?

It may. If it is possible without enormous difficulty, this is something 
that should certainly be in place for 9.0. If it isn't possible, it may 
be a good idea to provide a second set of media with sysinstall for 
those who want it. I think that in any case, it is extremely unlikely 
that sysinstall will be entirely disconnected from the build before the 
release.

As regards the original posting, I totally share Devin's concern about 
wide hardware compatibility, including with very old hardware, and wish 
him the best of luck with sysinstall life support! As for bsdinstall, I 
have taken a substantial amount of effort to ensure that bsdinstall work 
on older hardware (I have tested it on a VT220 at 9600 baud connected to 
a 13-year-old Sun Ultra 5) and would regard it failing in any way on any 
hardware on which FreeBSD will boot as a serious bug.
-Nathan