Scripting sysinstall(8) to create & use multiple slices on a
disk?
John Baldwin
jhb at freebsd.org
Mon Mar 8 15:34:28 UTC 2010
On Saturday 06 March 2010 8:28:54 am Josh Paetzel wrote:
> I'd also like to mention John saying you can build a custom mfsroot to use
> additional tools during install...I go a different tack on this. I'm a huge
> fan of python, and like to use it for installers. Rather than build a custom
> mfsroot with python what I prefer to do is build a chroot that the target
> machine boots diskless off. Then I chroot into that directory and install
> whatever tools I want using ports/packages. I find that getting FreeBSD to
> boot diskless is so easy that I've had it accidentally happen more than once
> when I wanted something else to happen. Installing ports in a chroot is also
> pretty trivial. Building a custom mfsroot has a bit of a learning curve with
> a fairly expensive trial and error penalty.
I agree that building a custom mfsroot from scratch would be a bit of a PITA.
I generally cheat by just patching src/release/<arch>/boot_crunch.conf to add
the tools I want to use. I find dialog(1) useful for popping up
sysinstall-style dialog boxes from shell scripts. I have also seen folks
build a completely separate MFS root separate from the release process. While
that was more tedious to get started, it was certainly more flexible.
--
John Baldwin
More information about the freebsd-hackers
mailing list