BSDInstall on sparc64

[Marius Strobl]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 02:34:41AM +0000, Craig Butler wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 19:24 -0600, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> > On 02/22/11 17:30, Craig Butler wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2011-02-15 at 11:03 -0600, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> > >> I've prepared a test ISO image of the new BSDInstall installer for
> > >> sparc64, which can be found at:
> > >> http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-sparc64-20110215.iso.bz2
> > >>
> > >> It works fine on my Ultra 5, but I'd appreciate wider testing on sparc64
> > >> (as well as general feedback) before we begin integrating this into the
> > >> build infrastructure.
> > >> -Nathan
> > >> _______________________________________________
> > >> freebsd-sparc64 at freebsd.org mailing list
> > >> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-sparc64
> > >> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-sparc64-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> > > Hi Nathan
> > >
> > > Not working for me.... looks to panic after the guided partition of
> > > entire disk.  Then reboots.
> > >
> > > NatureTech 777S... 8.1 via normal sysinstall works.
> > 
> > Can you provide any details on the panic? What was the last screen you 
> > saw before the crash?
> > -Nathan
> 
> Pressed enter to save the suggested partition scheme, it formatted the
> partitions then page of text (flashed by so quick), then binned out to
> ok.
> 
> I am going to try and burn the cd again in case it's a write error in
> the burn process (the cd drive can be upset by different media)
> 
> Will try again tomorrow.
> 

I tried the guided installation on my 777S and it worked without
problems, it took my several attempts though as the drive apparently 
is beginning to fail and had problems reading the CD-RW. F.e. if that
happened while the loader was loading the kernel via OFW this just
triggered a fatal MMU exception. Maybe such a problem was also the
cause of the problem you were seeing? In any case if you can reproduce
that it you would be helpful if you could capture the panic via the
serial console.

As for BSDInstall in general it seems to have problems when it should
re-use a existing disk layout when doing a manual setup as in that case
it always seems to preserve the existing filesystem and then can't
overwrite /var/empty. If you do the same via sysinstall /var/empty
isn't a problem even if the filesystem is preserved. I've no idea
whether this is due to sysinstall being intelligent enough to deal
with the schg-bit or these aren't contained in the distribution
tarballs or preserved when these are untared in the first place.
Generally I'm missing a way to specify whether BSDInstall should
preserve an existing filesystem or not, i.e. the toggle-newfs flag
of sysinstall, and also a way to turn softupdates on/off for f.e.
the root-filesystem like sysinstall had. I'm also somewhat missing
the output sysinstall redirects to ttyv1 so one could check what it's
currently doing or the cause of a failure as well as the emergency
shell it opens on ttyv2 (or ttyv3?) during install.

This also reminds me of a problem I started to see beginning with
8.0; the light and dark colors of the sysinstall menus (apart from
that I don't use colors on the console) were inverted, i.e. instead
of dark-blue a light-blue block would be displayed and vice versa.
Is that also also an issue on powerpc? I thought that the cause
likely would be an endian-bug in teken. I'm not yet sure whether
the BSDInstall menus look like they are supposed to on sparc64.

Marius