bin/164281: bsdinstall(8): please allow sysinstall as installer option

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 05/25/14 09:32, Allan Jude wrote:
> On 2014-05-25 12:27, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>> I'm (finally) integrating these patches now. Could you remind me what
>> the point of the gnop is? I'm not sure I get it.
>> -Nathan
> The 'gnop -S 4096 <device>' makes a virtual device that has a sector
> size of 4096 bytes. This causes ZFS to set ashift=12 even for devices
> that mis-advertise (lie about) their sector size. There is no real harm
> in using 4k sectors on a 512b sector device, but using 512b sectors on a
> 4k device will cause write amplification (read-modify-write) since the
> device will have to deal with it as a partial block update.

I think our ATA code mostly has this under control at this point.

> Additionally, the sector size can only be set at pool creation time,
> even if you have have 512b sector devices, you'll want to create your
> pool as 4k, so that in the future when you add additional devices, or
> replace failed devices, the 4k sector devices will be supported. ZFS
> complains loudly when you try to add mis-matched sector size devices to
> a pool.
>
>

This is a good reason, even if the circumstances behind it are stupid. 
Is there really no way to handle this besides gnop? Can't we just fix ZFS?
-Nathan