FreeBSD Installer Roadmap

[Josh Paetzel]

On Monday, February 21, 2011 08:38:03 pm Devin Teske wrote:

> 
> Really, the crux of the issue is that our organization is **just now**
> migrating off of FreeBSD-4 (yes, it's true... there are over 1,000
> FreeBSD-4.11 machines running in production at this very moment spanning
> the entire United States, parts of India, and parts of the Indo-pacific
> rim). Worse? We just added yet-another 200+ to those ranks in the past 2
> months.
> 
> My hat is off to you sir... as I envy your position that you can be so
> free-moving. We are encumbered by entrenched methods and do not have the
> luxury of trying new things for the sake of change (case in-point, since
> bsdinstall brings nothing new to the table that we rely upon, it truly
> would be change for the sake of change in our organization).
> 
> Fin de dialectics.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Cheers,
> Devin Teske

Maintaining sysinstall for 4.x is indeed a NOOP, since features aren't being 
added to it, and the featureset that sysinstall supports is pretty much in 
line with the featureset in 4...no ZFS, no geom_*, etc etc etc.

On the other hand, maintaining sysinstall for the next N years of new FreeBSD 
releases seems hard, when it's already missing features compared to what 
FreeBSD supports, and that's likely to continue to grow.

I totally agree that for internal use, migrating thousands of lines of code 
makes no sense whatsoever, especially if sysinstall meets your needs and you 
don't care about the functionality it doesn't have.  Exporting that to the 
community seems to be a questionable use of resources.

I'm no stranger to large deployments.  With my ${WORK} hat on we can install a 
thousand FreeBSD systems in a week.  In my 16+ years of involvement with 
FreeBSD I've written three automated installers...quite frankly, ditching 
sysinstall for that happened really fast.

I do admit to being a tad curious where you find systems that can run FreeBSD 
4 at this point.  A single socket intel shows up as 8 or 12 CPUs these days, 
more than enough to tie 4.x into knots.  Add in disk controllers, NICs, ACPI 
(modern systems use that for nearly everything it seems) and suddenly an 
installer seems the least of the concerns.

I suppose my last question is along the lines of, "If adding geom_mirror 
support to sysinstall was easy, why has it been 6+ years since gmirror made 
it's appearance in FreeBSD and you still can't create or install to a gmirror 
with sysinstall?"
  

-- 
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel
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