FreeBSD 9

[Devin Teske]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-
> questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Chad Perrin
> Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 3:15 PM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: FreeBSD 9
> 
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 02:36:29PM -0800, Devin Teske wrote:
> > > From: Frank Shute
> > >
> > > The new installer will get better with time.
> >
> > The new installer is buggy, and the above maxim is something I'd
> > rather not have to deal with when downloading RELEASE software.
> 
[snip]
> If the reason it was decided to create bsdinstall and replace sysinstall was
simply
> to do something new

The way we view the timeline of events is:

1. FreeBSD in the beginning had one official filesystem -- UFS1 -- for the root
filesystem.

2. FreeBSD gets a new filesystem -- UFS2. sysinstall(8) is updated to support
this as the new ONLY offering (though you can still get a UFS1 partition by
pressing "Z" to set a custom value for newfs arguments, if you're in-the-know).

3. Enterprise FreeBSD community then desperately wants journaling filesystem,
but ZFS is the only offering with built-in journaling (gjournal does not qualify
here) as McKusick's SU+J is not ready yet.

4. Community recognizes that sysinstall(8) needs to be updated but can't
envision a successful re-work of the C-code that provides the "FDISK Partition
Editor" screen to the point where it can handle both the UFS options as well as
ZFS, etc.

5. Nathan Whitehorn envisions bsdinstall to solve the problem.

However, we feel that something went wrong along the way.

If FreeBSD had decided that there is no need to offer ZFS-on-root and instead
put their eggs in the SU+J basket, then modifying sysinstall(8) to meet the
needs of supporting SU+J would have been trivial at-best as all options would be
UFS based.

Hypothetically, once you landed in the "FDISK Partition Editor" of
sysinstall(8), the "auto" partitioning would default to UFS2 SU+J and you could
toggle any combination of SU+J, SU-J, and no-SU/J.

In fact, this is still a possibility. sysinstall(8) could be enhanced to support
SU+J and the people that don't care about ZFS-on-root can be happy with the
sysinstall(8) route as it still leads to a journaled filesystem. Meanwhile, if
they want ZFS-on-root, they'll have to go to the bsdinstall route.
-- 
Devin

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