From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jun 4 05:58:06 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DD70716A41F for ; Mon, 4 Jun 2007 05:58:06 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from craig@feniz.gank.org) Received: from ion.gank.org (ion.gank.org [69.55.238.164]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9A1BE13C455 for ; Mon, 4 Jun 2007 05:58:02 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from craig@feniz.gank.org) Received: by ion.gank.org (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 1CC39110F2; Mon, 4 Jun 2007 00:58:02 -0500 (CDT) Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2007 00:58:07 -0500 From: Craig Boston To: Ivan Voras Message-ID: <20070604055757.GA2379@nowhere> Mail-Followup-To: Craig Boston , Ivan Voras , freebsd-stable@freebsd.org References: <4662016A.8070100@mail.ru> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.2i Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Sysinstall replacement X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2007 05:58:06 -0000 On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 12:36:15AM +0200, Ivan Voras wrote: > See http://wiki.freebsd.org/finstall . Somewhat tangental, the only thing that really jumps out at me is this: > I propose the UFS+gjournal be the default FS type (even for > root+boot?) I think this is not such a good idea. While I like gjournal, and use it quite a bit, I don't think it's suitable as a default. For one thing, with default settings, it carves out a full GB of usable space from each filesystem that it's used on. This would prove highly surprising to new users, especially on smaller filesystems such as /var, and may well cause them to think FreeBSD uses a highly inefficient filesystem. Also, gjournal journals *everything*, not just metadata. When the data and journal are on the same physical device, as they would be in most setups that take the defaults, all write operations are effectively done twice (modulo any write-combining). Again, this probably wouldn't be expected for a default and would lead to perceived slowness. Both of these are quite acceptable tradeoffs for what gjournal does, but the user should be aware of them before choosing to employ it. I think it would be wonderful to have in the installer, just not as the default. I also don't think that ext2 should be offered in the installer, as there have been periodic stability problems with it, and new users accustomed to Linux may pick it out of habit and get bitten. Craig P.S. I pretty much never use sysinstall anymore, preferring to set up things as gjournal and geli using Fixit mode, then just extract the tarballs into the new filesystems. Having a good standalone partitioning tool would be nice though, as doing all the math by hand can be tedious. Any chance that the module that handles that could be set up so it's possible to use it independently?