From owner-freebsd-arch Mon Dec 10 17: 1:11 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.22.40]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C7BB337B405 for ; Mon, 10 Dec 2001 17:01:04 -0800 (PST) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.acs.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id fBB112J59166; Mon, 10 Dec 2001 20:01:02 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <44607.1008027292@winston.freebsd.org> References: <44607.1008027292@winston.freebsd.org> Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 20:00:58 -0500 To: Jordan Hubbard From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: Proposed auto-sizing patch to sysinstall (was Re: Using a larger block size on large filesystems) Cc: freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 3:34 PM -0800 12/10/01, Jordan Hubbard wrote: >Matt writes: > > I don't think we need a 'Does everything look correct' requester. > >The reason that it's there, and I disliked it too when I first thought >about it, is that since the partitions are not created until the very >end, you don't get the nice /dev/sd0s1f type of device names since the >label editor doesn't know this until it creates the chunks with >libdisk. The reason it doesn't create them initially is because >everything except the manually created filesystems are done >"speculatively" since it would be very expensive to create and delete >chunks when shuffling between profiles, and libdisk is also fragile >enough that I'd sort of expect that to break if you did it enough >times. So I thought the user might like the chance to actually see >the final layout before proceeding, and if I just exit the screen >immediately on (Q)uit, you'd never see it. Perhaps that's just fine >though. What do folks think? I think it "feels stupid" to have it ask "Does everything look correct?" at that point, even though I understand the issue you're trying to address. Perhaps another way of doing this is that the "Auto mode" should not have a (Q)uit option. Instead, it could have some option like (F)reeze or (F)inish or (B)ack, and that option drops the user back into the standard screen with all the partitions and partition-settings filled in. The person then gets to see exactly how all the partitions look, and can decide if things looks right before typing (Q)uit. So, the effect is the same, but we won't have the oddity that we ask the user "does everything look right?" when they pick an automatic partition scheme, but we don't ask when they build the partitions by hand. I guess the other question which comes to mind is how does this handle settings like "softupdates", or existing partitions which someone might want to keep? (and which, therefore, one would not want to NEWFS) From an earlier message: >It also deals nicely with the issue of having multiple slices - you no >longer have to go to a specific slice and "lay it out", the auto-layout >feature taking advantage of all available (FreeBSD) slices without any >special user intervention. I assume it is only taking advantage of slices which were selected in the earlier fdisk step? Or to ask the question another way, what if the user does NOT want to use all available FreeBSD slices? I always have multiple bootable freebsd systems on my machines, and so usually I want the installation process to play with only one specific slice, and not every freebsd slice that it can find. I would probably have to see this in action to understand how well it works, but I'm just trying to think up some oddball situations which might be a problem. From your description so far, I think that what you're working towards will be very nice. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message