BSDInstall: I want the bikeshed painted plaid

[Garrett Cooper]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 1:25 PM, John Hixson <jhixson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 11:58 PM, Marco Steinbach
> <coco at executive-computing.de> wrote:
>>
>> John Hixson wrote on 02.01.2011 22:51:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Nathan Whitehorn
>>> <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org>wrote:
>>>
>>>> I spent a bunch of time looking at pc-sysinstall before starting to work
>>>> on
>>>> this. The major problem for non-x86 systems is that it heavily assumes
>>>> that
>>>> your disks are either MBR+bsdlabel or GPT. If you have anything
>>>> different
>>>> (APM, VTOC8, or even a raw bsdlabel or MBR installation on x86), it
>>>> breaks
>>>> in strange and fascinating ways due to a random mixture of if (scheme ==
>>>> MBR) else and if (scheme == GPT) else in the backend. Some of these are
>>>> easily fixed, but it looked quite difficult to root out all of the
>>>> places
>>>> this assumption is made, not to mention teaching it about various styles
>>>> of
>>>> boot code, that the same partitioning scheme may need to be set up
>>>> different
>>>> ways on different architectures, etc. txt-sysinstall also segfaults when
>>>> you
>>>> try to run it on powerpc at the moment, though that is likely a simple
>>>> bug
>>>> and I didn't look into it in detail.
>>>>
>>>> What I intended with bsdinstall is to have something simple, flexible,
>>>> and
>>>> easily maintained that works immediately on all platforms and will be
>>>> ready
>>>> for 9.0 for sure. If pc-sysinstall materializes before then, or after
>>>> then,
>>>> and people like it better, I'm more than happy to get out of the way;
>>>> this
>>>> is the reason the wiki page is titled "Stopgap Installer". In the
>>>> interim, I
>>>> hoped to at least start laying out the hammer and nails next to
>>>> sysinstall's
>>>> coffin.
>>>> -Nathan
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I would be more than happy to help out with making pc-sysinstall work on
>>> non-x86 systems, however I don't have access to any. Do any of you have
>>> hardware that could possibly be used by interested parties? I'm sure all
>>> the
>>> work that's gone into bsdinstall could be used in pc-sysinstall or vice
>>> versa.
>>
>> I have PowerMacs (G3/G4) and Netras/Ultras (T1 105, U10, U5) at my
>> discretion.  I've never installed FreeBSD on any of them, but would be
>> willing to give it a shot.
>>
>> I can provide serial console access to the Sparcs, but the PowerMacs
>> supposedly need "hands on", which I can also provide.
>>
>> If there's interest, I humbly suggest discussing further details on the
>> course of action at sysinstall@, to which I just subscribed.
>>
>
> I just subscribed to sysinstall at . I'd be happy to help starting out on the
> sparcs. I have no experience whatsoever on powermac, but it sounds fun ;-).

    PowerPC macs aren't that hard because the `newer' ones run
openfirmware like sparcs. Some of the hardware is different and more
`interesting', but that shouldn't deter anyone from making progress on
a Mac with netboot images (it's one-time setup in openfirmware if done
properly and pretty trivial at that). Lemme know if you need help with
this offline and I'll see what I can do.
Cheers,
-Garrett