RFC: Patches to achieve bsdinstall script without dialogs

Ellis H. Wilson III ellisw at panasas.com
Thu Feb 26 20:00:19 UTC 2015


All,

We use FreeBSD extensively here at Panasas, and in our day-to-day 
software development it behooves us to have an automatic way to spin up 
our various clients with fresh installs.  Occasionally, one of these 
automated installs, which relies on the various components of 
bsdinstall, bails, locks up, or otherwise malfunctions.  At that 
juncture, checking our console logs is our best/only recourse since 
these are head-less machines, but the existing code presumes (even in 
the case of scripted installs) dialog will render properly.  This is 
typically not the case in our live console or console logs for a variety 
of reasons, and this results in our engineers wading through a lot of 
dialog "curses-gunk" to find the relevant pieces of ascii that have made 
their way through.

Therefore, after positive discussion with Nathan Whitehorn about the 
general utility of having an ascii-only install option, we have 
implemented such and been running the attached patches for a few months 
with success here.  These enable a somewhat friendlier ASCII output when 
scripted installation is requested, without sacrificing (most of) the 
niceties of progress indication and the like.  These also shouldn't 
impact non-scripted installation, which still utilize dialogs.  With the 
ultimate hope of these being accepted upstream and benefiting others, I 
am first presenting them here for your comment.  These impact the 
following files, and are named accordingly:

usr.sbin/bsdconfig/share/common.subr
usr.sbin/bsdinstall/distextract/distextract.c
usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts/checksum
usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts/script
usr.sbin/bsdinstall/partedit/partedit.c
usr.sbin/bsdinstall/partedit/scripted.c
usr.sbin/bsdinstall/partedit/partedit.h

These are patched from 10.1 releng, as that is what we are running.  If 
it will smooth the process towards upstreaming things, I can patch 
against a different set of sources (i.e., CURRENT), just let me know.

Best,

ellis
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