sysinstall, GJOURNAL and ZFS

[Dan Naumov]

> UFS2+SoftUpdates works fine on properly configured UFS2 - and very fast.
Yes, UFS2+SoftUpdates is very fast, however, in the case of a power
loss or having to pull the plug on a locked up system, it has a
noticeably higher chance of leaving you with an unbootable system than
if you were using Linux with ext3/ext4 or Windows with NTFS.


> Why you need sysinstall AT ALL?
I am well capable of doing a textmode installation using console
commands only, so _I_ don't. However, sysinstall is what the majority
of new users are presented with when giving FreeBSD a try. A new user
who loses data (let alone has his system become unbootable) on an
unclean shutdown is a very unhappy user. A very unhappy user is a user
likely to go back to what he was using before trying FreeBSD. Happy
users means more users, more users means more developers, more
developers means more active development, which is surely not a bad
thing. DO NOT underestimate the value of a good installer with good
defaults.


<SNIP>
>
> then install bootblock and edit fstab, your system will boot.
Having to do manual operating system installations in the year 2009 is
a broken installation process.


> Sysinstall is to help beginners, but do beginners need so complex setups?
A user who wants his data to be well protected and his system to have
high resistance to becoming unbootable in the case of a power loss is
a user with completely reasonable expectations, not a user with a
"complex setup".


- Dan Naumov