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. > -Nathan > _______________________________________________ > 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"
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. _______________________________________________ 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"
