svn commit: r195817 - head/usr.sbin/sysinstall

[Nathan Whitehorn]

John Baldwin wrote:
> [snipped]
>> Ah, we will never be freed of the CHS bonds, will we.  Oh well.
>>     
>
> GPT doesn't use C/H/S and thus doesn't have the weird limitations of the MBR + 
> BSD label arrangement.  As soon as sysinstall can install to a GPT-labelled 
> disk you will be free of the bonds in sysinstall.  I think the easiest way to 
> allow for that w/o dealing with the headaches of fdisk.c and label.c and 
> libgeom support in sysinstall, etc., etc. is to add a sort of "cheat" mode to 
> sysinstall where you can say "look, I've already partitioned my drives and 
> newfs'd my filesystems and they are mounted at '/foo', go install all the 
> bits into there".  We could then let people setup their disks using command 
> line tools with the livefs or what is in the install rescue build using GPT 
> or ZFS or gmirror, etc.  Getting /etc/fstab correct in that instance becomes 
> a bit more tricky, but not impossible.  (If nothing else one could take the 
> output of mount -p, find all the paths starting with /foo, chop off the 
> leading /foo, and write that out as an initial /etc/fstab.)  That would at 
> least allow people to do more creative things with disks with sysinstall 
> until the disk labeller can be overhauled.
>
>   
This would be extremely useful also on PowerPC, and probably some 
embedded systems as well (though I doubt they are using sysinstall). 
sysinstall currently cannot write APM partitions, so we don't currently 
ship a functional installer on PPC. However, gpart can write APM 
partitions, and so this even this stopgap would be the difference 
between an installable 8.0-RELEASE on PowerPC and an uninstallable one 
for many users.
-Nathan