sysinstall, GJOURNAL and ZFS

[Dan Naumov]

Hello list

Let me preface this by saying that I do not have coding
knowledge/experience, but I am willing to donate my time to help test
things if somebody is already working on this. Hopefully, this will
prevent most of the potential "feel free to submit patches" responses
:)

Is there any work going on to make sysinstall recognize and abe able
to create and work with GJOURNAL and ZFS? In the days of 1,5-2,0
terabyte harddrives, UFS2 + SoftUpdates simply doesn't cut it anymore,
but since this is the only thing you can do from within sysinstall, it
is what the vast majority of people giving FreeBSD a try are going to
end up with. If you tell a Windows or a Linux user that having a
sudden power loss or having to pull the plug on a locked system can
result in an unbootable FreeBSD system, a very large portion of them
is going to run away screaming, never giving FreeBSD a second look.
And yes, I know that the same things can theoretically render Windows
or Linux unbootable, but let's be honest here, it is a LOT more likely
to happen to an UFS2 + SoftUpdates system than NTFS or EXT3/EXT4.

This calls for more robust default options/settings to be presented by
the sysinstall to the new user. GJOURNAL and ZFS present themselves as
the most sensible options in this case.


Sincerely,
- Dan Naumov