HEADS UP: sysinstall is no longer the default installer

John Baldwin jhb at freebsd.org
Mon Mar 14 15:44:34 UTC 2011


On Monday, March 14, 2011 10:13:30 am Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> I just committed (r219641) changes that make the release infrastructure 
> (src/release/Makefile) use bsdinstall by default instead of sysinstall 
> on install media. A big thank you is in order to everyone who provided 
> advice, criticism, and testing for this project over the last few months!
> 
> Along with sysinstall, the original sysinstall build stuff has been 
> preserved (now /usr/src/release/Makefile.sysinstall) and will continue 
> to be for the lifetime of the 9.x release series, although it will not 
> be used by default. This change modifies the process of building 
> releases somewhat, so I'll outline changes that people who run snapshot 
> buildbots will have to make below, and some next steps planned with the 
> installer.

Please consider supporting using SVN or CVS to obtain docs, ports, and source 
trees.  I have a custom SVN repo at work that is not exported to CVS and 
available via csup and am able to use the existing SVNROOT SVNBRANCH variables 
with 'make release'.  Having support for this sort of thing would be useful.  
I have also made much use of LOCAL_PATCHES in the past for building releases, 
so having support for that would be useful as well.

I think for re@ especially it is nice to just do 'make release TAG=7.2' (or 
some such) and have it DTRT to check out matching ports, doc, and src into the 
chroot, etc.  I think the new process should be similarly automated.

Have you tested network installs using PXE or the like?  This was fairly easy 
before as you could copy the '/boot' directory from a bootable ISO and the 
mfsroot was self-contained.  Do you now have to put the entire contents of 
release.iso up via NFS?  Is there a subset you put in the NFS root and then do 
an NFS or FTP install?
 
-- 
John Baldwin


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