FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

[Garrett Cooper]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 7:23 PM, Devin Teske <dteske at vicor.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 22, 2011, at 12:57 PM, Peter Jeremy wrote:
>
>> On 2011-Feb-22 02:50:54 -0800, Devin Teske <dteske at vicor.com> wrote:
>>> That's the operative word here ("supports"). Lord help us when that
>>> changes to "requires" (that is to say, if/when the FreeBSD kernel
>>> becomes legacy-free with respect to supporting fdisk/disklabel
>>> partitioned disks).
>>
>> When that does come, it will probably be driven by BIOS and hardware
>> vendors dropping support for MBR.  Current disks are at the upper
>> limit of what MBR can be support (and that's after several revamps of
>> MBR).  Since GPT already provides a superior feature set without MBR's
>> limits, the next step will be to just drop MBR support.  And when it
>> does come, FreeBSD needs to be ready with an installer that can cope
>> with non-MBR disks.

While I love a good discussion (and there have been a number of good
points for either side on here), should we agree to switch the default
over to bsdinstall, leave sysinstall in (lumps or no lumps), then over
the period of the next 2~3 major (that amounts to 4~6 years) releases,
and retire sysinstall to the happy hunting grounds? sysinstall didn't
take up that much space on the release media I thought, and it might
be doable to map both sets of media so that sysinstall can work in
harmony on bsdinstall's release media?

Preparing custom releases to use the sysinstall init_path isn't that
bad, so it would at least give the legacy folks time to transition
over while us guinea pigs burn in the new wax :)...

Sound good?

Thanks!
-Garrett