Experiences with 9.0-rc1 installer, small home NAS/fileserver.

[james]

Not sure this is the best place to give feedback  Tho I'm certainly 
going to complain.  Bit random, notes as I go (from about half-way 
through a frustrating day anyway)

The system:
AMD E350 mobo, 4off 2GB drives I want to use in ZFS RAIDZ, and an SSD on 
SATA5 I want to use for boot/zil/l2arc.
CD is USB external.

Boot ends:

cd0: cd present [... records]
Mounting from cd9660:/dev/iso9660/FREEBSD_INSTALL failed with error 19.

Loader variables
   vfs.root.mountfrom=cd9660:/dev/iso9660/FREEBSD_INSTALL
   vfs.root.mountfrom.options=ro

Then it asks for manual root specification.

At this point:

	cd9660:/dev/cd0 *does* work

Now, what I'd like to do is to use the SSD (ada4) for boot, 2Gb ZIL, 
30GB L2ARC.

This is NOT straightforward, it seems, and I found the system less easy 
to use than sysinstall.

Worse, I was able to run sysinstall from the live cd, and to partition 
and slice the disk as I wanted - but I couldn't convince it to load the 
distribution sets using either 'CD/DVD' or 'existing filesystem'.

Now, I thought I'd managed to get sysinstall to partition it and create 
a bunch of slices, but next time into the new installer it seemed not. Odd.

Anyway, it seems very hard to get the new installer to create an ada4s1a 
type slice - I ended up with GPT ada4p1 to ada4p5 where p4 is 2G with no 
moint and p5 is 30G with no moint point.

Not a very happy experience.  The old sysinstall fdisk and label screens 
were more usable in my view (and I'm only an occassional FreeBSD user - 
I'm trying this because Illumos doesn't handle the LAN chip on this 
mobo), and what is there now is neither 'the same but better' nor 'more 
like you get in Linux'. Full marks for trying to allow GPT/DOS/BSD type 
partitioning, but it was very frustrating in practice.

In particular, if you're going to provide sysinstall so we can just go 
to live CD and fire it up - please make it work!


I got to a point where I have ada4 with GPT table, p1 to p4 defined, 
32GB free.  If I go 'Create' and change the type to 'freebsd' (ie delete 
'-ufs' because I'm not going to mount it - I'm going to use it as L2ARC) 
then I don't get ada4p5 - I get ada4s5 and type is BSD.  Now if I go 
'Modify' on ada4s5 then I get an error popup 'Invalid argument: arg0 
'ada4s5').  I can create ada4p5 as 'freebsd-ufs' with no mount point.

There's no hint which type strings are valid, and I was able to use 
'freebsd' if I create as 'freebsd-ufs' and then 'modify' and remove 
'-ufs'.  Ideally, of course, there would be:
  - some help about what strings are OK
  - options for 'raw', and perhaps some ZFS-related things too (zpool 
device, cache, log) if it doesn't make sense to create as raw.

Having said all that, when the installer works OK and does what you 
want, then its pretty quick.


Other nits:

* if I set a UK keyboard, then probably I want Europe/United Kingdom as 
the default timezone.

* the boot screen daemon has no face features!

At least its installed now, and uses a pleasingly small amount of RAM. 
prior to creating a zpool, anyhow.

James