On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 3:06 AM, krad <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 14 January 2011 18:26, Nathan Whitehorn <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> As those of you who have been reading freebsd-sysinstall and freebsd-arch
>> know, I have been working for a few weeks on a lightweight new installer
>> named 'bsdinstall'. This is designed to replace sysinstall for the 9.0
>> release.
>>
>> After two weeks of testing and bug fixes on the sysinstall list, I believe
>> this now has all required functionality and is ready to be merged into the
>> main source tree. I would like to do this on Tuesday, 18 January. Switching
>> this to be the default installer would happen a few weeks after that,
>> pending discussion on release formats with the release engineering team.
>> This should provide a sufficient testing period before 9.0 and allow a
>> maximal number of bugs to be discovered and solved before the release is
>> shipped.
>>
>> Demo ISO for i386:
>> http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-i386-20110114.iso.bz2
>> SVN repository: svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/user/nwhitehorn/bsdinstall
>> Wiki page: http://wiki.freebsd.org/BSDInstall
>>
>> Goals
>> -----
>> The primary goal of BSDInstall is to provide an easily extensible installer
>> without the limitations of sysinstall, in order to allow more modern
>> installations of FreeBSD. This means that it should have additional features
>> to support modern setups, but simultaneously frees us to remove complicating
>> features of sysinstall like making sure everything fits in floppy disk-sized
>> chunks.
>>
>> New Features:
>> - Allows installation onto GPT disks on x86 systems
>> - Can do installations spanning multiple disks
>> - Allows installation into jails
>> - Eases PXE installation
>> - Virtualization friendly: can install from a live system onto disk
>> images
>> - Works on PowerPC
>> - Streamlined system installation
>> - More flexible scripting
>> - Easily tweakable
>> - All install CDs are live CDs
>>
>> Architecture
>> ------------
>> BSDInstall is a set of tools that are called in sequence by a master script.
>> These tools are, for example, the partition editor, the thing that fetches
>> the distributions from the network, the thing that untars them, etc. Since
>> these are just called in sequence from a shell script, a scripted
>> installation can easily replace them with other things, (e.g. hard-coded
>> gpart commands), leave steps out, add new ones, or interleave additional
>> system modifications.
>>
>> Status
>> ------
>> This provides functionality most similar to the existing sysinstall
>> 'Express' track. It installs working, bootable systems you can ssh into
>> immediately after reboot on i386, amd64, sparc64, powerpc, and powerpc64.
>> There is untested support for pc98. The final architecture on which we use
>> sysinstall, ia64, is currently unsupported, because I don't know how to set
>> up booting on those systems -- patches to solve this are very much welcome.
>>
>> There are still some missing features that I would like to see in the
>> release, but these do not significantly impact the functionality of the
>> installer. Some will be addressed before merging to HEAD, in particular the
>> lack of a man page for bsdinstall. Others, like configuration of wireless
>> networking and ZFS installation, can happen between merge and release. The
>> test ISOs are also lacking a ports tree at the moment, which is a statement
>> about the slow upload speed of my DSL line and not about the final layout of
>> releases.
>>
>> Please send any questions, comments, or patches you may have, and please be
>> aware when replying that this email has been cross-posted to three lists.
>> Technical discussion (bug reports, for instance) should be directed to the
>> freebsd-sysinstall list only. Most other discussion belongs on -sysinstall
>> and -current.
>
> I dont follow the freebsd-sysinstall and freebsd-arc list so sorry if
> this has already been discussed. From what I have seen pc-sysinstall
> already does all these things, and can install freebsd. Therefore why
> are we reinventing the wheel?
>
> I don't mean this as any disrespect to the work you have done.
Hi Krad,
I asked this two weeks ago and in summary:
- pc-sysinstall is x86-centric and porting to powerpc is non-trivial,
and sysinstall is incomplete on powerpc. Nate sought to get a working
powerpc port with minimal effort.
Please read other replies in the archives on freebsd-arch /
freebsd-sysinstall to get more info as to why things have been done
the way they have been done.
Thanks,
-Garrett
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