On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 3:06 AM, krad <kra...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 14 January 2011 18:26, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhiteh...@freebsd.org> 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 _______________________________________________ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"