Sysinstall replacement

[Craig Boston]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 12:36:15AM +0200, Ivan Voras wrote:
> See http://wiki.freebsd.org/finstall .

Somewhat tangental, the only thing that really jumps out at me is this:

> I propose the UFS+gjournal be the default FS type (even for
> root+boot?)

I think this is not such a good idea.  While I like gjournal, and use it
quite a bit, I don't think it's suitable as a default.

For one thing, with default settings, it carves out a full GB of usable
space from each filesystem that it's used on.  This would prove highly
surprising to new users, especially on smaller filesystems such as /var,
and may well cause them to think FreeBSD uses a highly inefficient
filesystem.

Also, gjournal journals *everything*, not just metadata.  When the data
and journal are on the same physical device, as they would be in most
setups that take the defaults, all write operations are effectively done
twice (modulo any write-combining).  Again, this probably wouldn't be
expected for a default and would lead to perceived slowness.

Both of these are quite acceptable tradeoffs for what gjournal does, but
the user should be aware of them before choosing to employ it.  I think
it would be wonderful to have in the installer, just not as the default.

I also don't think that ext2 should be offered in the installer, as
there have been periodic stability problems with it, and new users
accustomed to Linux may pick it out of habit and get bitten.

Craig

P.S. I pretty much never use sysinstall anymore, preferring to set up
things as gjournal and geli using Fixit mode, then just extract the
tarballs into the new filesystems.  Having a good standalone
partitioning tool would be nice though, as doing all the math by hand
can be tedious.  Any chance that the module that handles that could be
set up so it's possible to use it independently?