Scripting bsdinstall

[Patrick Powell]

On 2019-12-25 04:48, Mike Remski wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 25, 2019 7:43:26 AM EST, Gleb Popov wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 25, 2019 at 4:37 PM Mike Remski <mremski at comcast.net> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, December 25, 2019 4:31:50 AM EST, Gleb Popov wrote:
>>> On Sun, Dec 22, 2019 at 9:47 PM Gleb Popov <arrowd at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 4:51 PM Matthew Seaman <matthew at freebsd.org>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>  ...
>>>
>>> I had to do all these "bsdinstall" invocations in the preamble 
>>> because I
>>> wanted to set up partitions in my way. It turned out that the value of
>>> PARTITIONS variable is directly passed to "bsdinstall scriptedpart", 
>>> so my
>>> installerscript got reduced to
>>>
>>> DISTRIBUTIONS="base.txz kernel.txz lib32.txz"
>>> PARTITIONS="ada0 gpt { 512K freebsd-boot , 2G freebsd-ufs / , 4G
>>> freebsd-swap , 8G freebsd-ufs /var , 4G freebsd-ufs /tmp , auto 
>>> freebsd-ufs
>>> /usr }"
>>>
>>> #!/bin/sh
>>>
>>> sysrc ifconfig_DEFAULT=DHCP
>>>
>>> It now works, and even the second part gets properly executed.
>>>
>>> However, no boot loader gets installed. Skimming through "bsdinstall
>>> bootconfig" source reveals that it only supports installing boot 
>>> files for
>>> UEFI loader. What should I do in case of BIOS?
>> In bsdinstall/scripts/zfsboot there are a couple things that look 
>> related to what you want.  GPART_BOOTCODE, GPART_BOOTCODE_PART and 
>> GPART_BOOTCODE_PARTONLY, plus GPART_SET_ACTIVE and 
>> GPART_SET_PMBR_ACTIVE.  I know you are using UFS, but it may help 
>> figure out what you need.
>>
>> Thanks for these, but I ended up adding
>>
>> gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 ada0
>>
>> to the second part of the script. It should be noted that it wasn't 
>> working without "-b /boot/pmbr" part.
>
> Ahh.  I think at one time you needed to do them as separate gpart 
> commands then you needed to have both options on the same command.  
> Glad you got it working.
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As a highly interested outside observer,  is it possible to put this 
accumulated wisdom into a document and put it on a FreeBSD Web Site?

Scripting FreeBSD installs seems to be a lost,  or at least,  arcane Art.

-- 
Patrick Powell                 Astart Technologies
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Network and System             San Diego, CA 92019
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