BSDInstall: merging to HEAD

[Marius Nünnerich]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 23:06, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 01/16/11 10:34, Marius Nünnerich wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 19:26, Nathan Whitehorn<nwhitehorn at freebsd.org>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> As those of you who have been reading freebsd-sysinstall and freebsd-arch
>>> know, I have been working for a few weeks on a lightweight new installer
>>> named 'bsdinstall'. This is designed to replace sysinstall for the 9.0
>>> release.
>>>
>>> After two weeks of testing and bug fixes on the sysinstall list, I
>>> believe
>>> this now has all required functionality and is ready to be merged into
>>> the
>>> main source tree. I would like to do this on Tuesday, 18 January.
>>> Switching
>>> this to be the default installer would happen a few weeks after that,
>>> pending discussion on release formats with the release engineering team.
>>> This should provide a sufficient testing period before 9.0 and allow a
>>> maximal number of bugs to be discovered and solved before the release is
>>> shipped.
>>>
>>> Demo ISO for i386:
>>> http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-i386-20110114.iso.bz2
>>> SVN repository: svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/user/nwhitehorn/bsdinstall
>>> Wiki page: http://wiki.freebsd.org/BSDInstall
>>>
>>> Goals
>>> -----
>>> The primary goal of BSDInstall is to provide an easily extensible
>>> installer
>>> without the limitations of sysinstall, in order to allow more modern
>>> installations of FreeBSD. This means that it should have additional
>>> features
>>> to support modern setups, but simultaneously frees us to remove
>>> complicating
>>> features of sysinstall like making sure everything fits in floppy
>>> disk-sized
>>> chunks.
>>>
>>> New Features:
>>> - Allows installation onto GPT disks on x86 systems
>>> - Can do installations spanning multiple disks
>>> - Allows installation into jails
>>> - Eases PXE installation
>>> - Virtualization friendly: can install from a live system onto disk
>>>  images
>>> - Works on PowerPC
>>> - Streamlined system installation
>>> - More flexible scripting
>>> - Easily tweakable
>>> - All install CDs are live CDs
>>>
>>> Architecture
>>> ------------
>>> BSDInstall is a set of tools that are called in sequence by a master
>>> script.
>>> These tools are, for example, the partition editor, the thing that
>>> fetches
>>> the distributions from the network, the thing that untars them, etc.
>>> Since
>>> these are just called in sequence from a shell script, a scripted
>>> installation can easily replace them with other things, (e.g. hard-coded
>>> gpart commands), leave steps out, add new ones, or interleave additional
>>> system modifications.
>>>
>>> Status
>>> ------
>>> This provides functionality most similar to the existing sysinstall
>>> 'Express' track. It installs working, bootable systems you can ssh into
>>> immediately after reboot on i386, amd64, sparc64, powerpc, and powerpc64.
>>> There is untested support for pc98. The final architecture on which we
>>> use
>>> sysinstall, ia64, is currently unsupported, because I don't know how to
>>> set
>>> up booting on those systems -- patches to solve this are very much
>>> welcome.
>>>
>>> There are still some missing features that I would like to see in the
>>> release, but these do not significantly impact the functionality of the
>>> installer. Some will be addressed before merging to HEAD, in particular
>>> the
>>> lack of a man page for bsdinstall. Others, like configuration of wireless
>>> networking and ZFS installation, can happen between merge and release.
>>> The
>>> test ISOs are also lacking a ports tree at the moment, which is a
>>> statement
>>> about the slow upload speed of my DSL line and not about the final layout
>>> of
>>> releases.
>>>
>>> Please send any questions, comments, or patches you may have, and please
>>> be
>>> aware when replying that this email has been cross-posted to three lists.
>>> Technical discussion (bug reports, for instance) should be directed to
>>> the
>>> freebsd-sysinstall list only. Most other discussion belongs on
>>> -sysinstall
>>> and -current.
>>> -Nathan
>>
>> Clean new virtualbox on FreeBSD host.
>>
>> Install ->  German ISO-8859-1 ->  "vbox" ->  Guided ->  ad0 ->  Partition
>> ->  "You have canceled an installation step"
>>
>> Actually I didn't cancel anything :)
>
> That is fixed now. Thanks for the report!

Thanks!

>> After using the entire disk and installing some distributions it hangs
>> waiting for the root password, it won't continue when I just press
>> enter.
>
> I can't reproduce this. What happens if you press control-C?

No reponse to Control-C. Maybe this happens only when the first thing
happened I described?
So trying to partion -> "canceled" -> use entire disk.
Or maybe it's related to the libdialog bug, when I couldn't enter a
root pw the carriage returns where missing.

>
>> The screen output looks garbled by a LOR. The screen waiting for the
>> root pw is garbled too. Seems like it's not doing a carriage return,
>> just line-feeds. I tried this again a second time and everything
>> worked normally.
>
> The LORs are from the UFS system. Since this is a 9.0-CURRENT snapshot,
> WITNESS is on in the install kernel. The carriage return issue may be
> related to a bug Garrett Cooper found in libdialog which will hopefully be
> fixed before too long.

Nice :)