FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

[Josh Paetzel]

On Saturday, February 19, 2011 02:44:42 am Bruce Cran wrote:
> On Saturday 19 February 2011 03:04:39 Devin Teske wrote:
> > There are many reasons for this, and none of them are selfish (although
> > it remains possible to drum-up some selfish reason, all of the reasons
> > behind our motivation are in-fact unselfish). Truth-be-told, I welcome
> > the replacement of sysinstall but am very wary that ANY replacement will
> > be able to exactly replicate the hardware compatibility that sysinstall
> > currently enjoys. I do indeed envision a great celebration as FreeBSD-9
> > bucks sysinstall but also at the same time have nightmares of receiving
> > waves of calls from people having trouble (for example) "installing
> > FreeBSD-9 on their AMD K6 based system, circa long-long-ago in a
> > universe far-far-away." (yes, we do have data centers running that very
> > equipment with uptime in the 1,000's of days).
> 
> I think bsdinstall as it currently is is simple enough that there shouldn't
> be any compatibility issues: it uses gpart for partitioning, runs tools
> like tzsetup to configure settings etc. so there's far less to go wrong
> than sysinstall's custom code which for example could crash on the
> "probing devices" screen.

pc-sysinstall has been used as the PC-BSD installer for quite a while now, and 
has done a lot of installs on a lot of different hardware platforms.  I'll 
wager that the compatibility of the shell command gpart is a better bet than 
the "stick your thumbs in you ears and yell nananana while you scribble 1's 
and 0's to a disk and voila, there's a disklabel" approach that sysinstall 
uses.

That being said, sysinstall holds FreeBSD back in a lot of ways, using GPT 
labeling, installing to ZFS, or gmirror, using geli, all require you to boot 
to a shell and do an install by hand.  I'm sure more people can chime in to 
limitations in sysinstall than I can think of off the top of my head.

So my question is: Given that everyone involved is very conscious of locking 
out FreeBSD from hardware platforms due to installer compatibility, wouldn't a 
better use of your time be investing in the future and ensuring that it works 
on legacy platforms as opposed to putting sysinstall on life support when it 
already has some fairly serious missing functionality, that is only likely to 
become more of an issue in the future?

-- 
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel
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