Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2011 01:03:07 -0600 From: Josh Paetzel <josh@tcbug.org> To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org, freebsd-sysinstall@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap Message-ID: <201102220103.20158.josh@tcbug.org> In-Reply-To: <EA1368DF-9728-4492-B1FC-5F7C2B521DE7@vicor.com> References: <4D35CFFB.3010302@freebsd.org> <201102211612.51233.josh@tcbug.org> <EA1368DF-9728-4492-B1FC-5F7C2B521DE7@vicor.com>
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[-- Attachment #1 --]
On Monday, February 21, 2011 08:38:03 pm Devin Teske wrote:
>
> Really, the crux of the issue is that our organization is **just now**
> migrating off of FreeBSD-4 (yes, it's true... there are over 1,000
> FreeBSD-4.11 machines running in production at this very moment spanning
> the entire United States, parts of India, and parts of the Indo-pacific
> rim). Worse? We just added yet-another 200+ to those ranks in the past 2
> months.
>
> My hat is off to you sir... as I envy your position that you can be so
> free-moving. We are encumbered by entrenched methods and do not have the
> luxury of trying new things for the sake of change (case in-point, since
> bsdinstall brings nothing new to the table that we rely upon, it truly
> would be change for the sake of change in our organization).
>
> Fin de dialectics.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Cheers,
> Devin Teske
Maintaining sysinstall for 4.x is indeed a NOOP, since features aren't being
added to it, and the featureset that sysinstall supports is pretty much in
line with the featureset in 4...no ZFS, no geom_*, etc etc etc.
On the other hand, maintaining sysinstall for the next N years of new FreeBSD
releases seems hard, when it's already missing features compared to what
FreeBSD supports, and that's likely to continue to grow.
I totally agree that for internal use, migrating thousands of lines of code
makes no sense whatsoever, especially if sysinstall meets your needs and you
don't care about the functionality it doesn't have. Exporting that to the
community seems to be a questionable use of resources.
I'm no stranger to large deployments. With my ${WORK} hat on we can install a
thousand FreeBSD systems in a week. In my 16+ years of involvement with
FreeBSD I've written three automated installers...quite frankly, ditching
sysinstall for that happened really fast.
I do admit to being a tad curious where you find systems that can run FreeBSD
4 at this point. A single socket intel shows up as 8 or 12 CPUs these days,
more than enough to tie 4.x into knots. Add in disk controllers, NICs, ACPI
(modern systems use that for nearly everything it seems) and suddenly an
installer seems the least of the concerns.
I suppose my last question is along the lines of, "If adding geom_mirror
support to sysinstall was easy, why has it been 6+ years since gmirror made
it's appearance in FreeBSD and you still can't create or install to a gmirror
with sysinstall?"
--
Thanks,
Josh Paetzel
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