Kernel not installed from CD

[Robert Watson]

On Sun, 22 Oct 2006, Erwin Lansing wrote:

> I haven't seen a report on this before, although I heard other people being 
> hit by the same problem before. Doing a fresh install from a BETA2 cd 
> forgets to install the kernel and modules to disk. Everything else is 
> installed just fine, so a simple copy of /dist/kernel/ to the installed disk 
> easily fixes the problem. A wild guess would be that this has something to 
> do with the SMP detection, although the first machine was SMP and the second 
> UP. If this already is reported and fixed, I'll just shut up and get a newer 
> BETA :-)

As a "me too" -- I've seen this happen a few times with previous FreeBSD 
releases, and I've not managed to trigger it reproduceably.  Rather 
frustrating, actually -- there are just one or two boxes I installed where the 
first time through the installer, no kernel was installed, but when I re-did 
the install, it was.  I tried to figure out what I had done differently, and 
wasn't able to track it down.  This is something we need to look into -- 
perhaps something about how we decide what kernel to install, etc?

It would be interesting to think about having sysintall produce an install log 
and install that in /var/db/install on the installed box, so that a log of 
what had happened during install (i.e., the debug output) was available after 
the install.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge