[Bug 211361] suggested boot partition size is too small, bsdinstall creates unaligned partitions

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https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=211361

--- Comment #11 from Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn at FreeBSD.org> ---
(In reply to Dag-Erling Smørgrav from comment #10)

Sure, but the *policy* shouldn't be in the installer, but in the userland tools
that it wraps. Otherwise, the default behavior of the installer is "correct",
but file systems created with ZFS will have the wrong IO size, partitions added
with gpart will have the wrong alignment, etc.

The installer is supposed to be an extremely thin wrapper around the normal
userland tools: it's a bare front-end for gpart, newfs, and tar. If we have bad
defaults in those tools, the problem should be fixed there rather than adding
magic to the installer to "fix" defaults that we control. sysinstall did this
rampantly and it was terrible; it made divergences between different methods of
installing the system and made new users go back to the installer to do things
and hose their systems thereby.

If we don't want the kernel to guess, and don't want the base userland tools to
guess, I would have no objections to some global tunable or something set by
the user that tells GEOM to round up to some value for stripe size, or an
additional GEOM property (recommended IO size), or some system setting that
suggests a minimum IO size and alignment to all userland tools. These could be
adopted universally and don't result in anything "lying". If any of those
solutions are too much to get done in time for the 11 release, I also wouldn't
object to a direct commit of your patch to stable/11 as a stopgap. But, beyond
that, modifying the installer to work around bad defaults in the operating
system generally is a bad idea and a road we should not go down.

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