On Mon, 14 Aug 2023, salqu...@duck.com wrote:
It looks like for UEFI installation, it executes “gpt -rq header <disk>”
command. I did not find logs of any other command both when I selected the
whole disk, and when I selected a particular wedge.
So, when I select the whole disk, it was:
“gpt -rq header wd0”
This looks correct.
And when I selected dk1 wedge, it was:
“gpt -rq header dk1"
This looks iffy. There's no "header" on a wedge--unless it's just trying to
get the wedge size.
I think this bug no longer exists in the sysinst where selecting preselected
wedge fails.
Not sure. The last time I tried, you couldn't select a wedge as the installation
target. It would fail horribly.
However, there is another bug. With NetBSD 10.x installer, when
we select the whole disk, say wd0, it removes all wedges except the EFI
system partition from the output of “dkctl wd0 listwedges”. I see these
errors logs scroll on the screen - removing dk2, etc.
And from that point onwards, the installer is practically unusable, because
“dkctl wd0 listwedges” shows only EFI partition, and the installer offers
only the system EFI partition as an option to install NetBSD.
Yes, I recall that it did just that when I installed 10.0-BETA some months
back, but nonetheless, my procedure worked fine. Maybe because I didn't exit
sysinst to create the GPT partition. I'd already created the new NetBSD
partition when I began. Try my procedure out again like that: once in sysinst
don't exit into the shell--to check on the log-data, for instance :).
Again, this bug no longer exists where we needed to manually configure these
flags. But, there is other issue now. It either does not select any
partition, or selects the NetBSD partition with only ‘install’ flag with
mount-point “/". It also selects the EFI system partition as EFI. However,
when I configure the NetBSD partition with “newfs” and “boot”, and “okay” the
partition changes, it shows me the same install menu again asking me to
choose the disk to install NetBSD on. Even when I accept the default
partition setting, the behavior is the same.
I needed to fiddle with this because I already had 2 NetBSD FFS partitions
on the HDD and sysinst marked both of 'em with a mount-point of "/" and the
"I" flag was set on the 1st NetBSD FFS partition it had found.
Utility menu’s sysinst logs offers a hint though. I think it does "gpt -rq
header dk1” when we select a preselected wedge dk1. The output of this
command is “GPT header not found”, which makes sense because it’s a wedge and
not a disk. So, I think the installer treats this as an error, and gives up
trying to install NetBSD on that wedge.
Yes, this doesn't look kosher as I said above.
Do we need to create a separate EFI partition for NetBSD? Can we get away by
using the EFI system partition? If sysinst is copying BOOTx64.EFI to the EFI
system partition, it is correctly recognizing the partition, right?
Not needed. You can just use a different directory on the System EFI partition.
But, I like to create an EFI partition for each of the different OSes that
are on the disk.
-RVP
