Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:45:15 -0500 From: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org> To: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> Cc: Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org>, src-committers@freebsd.org, svn-src-all@freebsd.org, cperciva@freebsd.org, svn-src-head@freebsd.org, mav@freebsd.org, "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com> Subject: Re: svn commit: r195817 - head/usr.sbin/sysinstall Message-ID: <4A6DAF6B.1050701@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <200907270821.52571.jhb@freebsd.org> References: <4A68DA56.60301@samsco.org> <20090724.235420.319856209.imp@bsdimp.com> <4A6A855C.7090003@samsco.org> <200907270821.52571.jhb@freebsd.org>
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John Baldwin wrote: > [snipped] >> Ah, we will never be freed of the CHS bonds, will we. Oh well. >> > > GPT doesn't use C/H/S and thus doesn't have the weird limitations of the MBR + > BSD label arrangement. As soon as sysinstall can install to a GPT-labelled > disk you will be free of the bonds in sysinstall. I think the easiest way to > allow for that w/o dealing with the headaches of fdisk.c and label.c and > libgeom support in sysinstall, etc., etc. is to add a sort of "cheat" mode to > sysinstall where you can say "look, I've already partitioned my drives and > newfs'd my filesystems and they are mounted at '/foo', go install all the > bits into there". We could then let people setup their disks using command > line tools with the livefs or what is in the install rescue build using GPT > or ZFS or gmirror, etc. Getting /etc/fstab correct in that instance becomes > a bit more tricky, but not impossible. (If nothing else one could take the > output of mount -p, find all the paths starting with /foo, chop off the > leading /foo, and write that out as an initial /etc/fstab.) That would at > least allow people to do more creative things with disks with sysinstall > until the disk labeller can be overhauled. > > This would be extremely useful also on PowerPC, and probably some embedded systems as well (though I doubt they are using sysinstall). sysinstall currently cannot write APM partitions, so we don't currently ship a functional installer on PPC. However, gpart can write APM partitions, and so this even this stopgap would be the difference between an installable 8.0-RELEASE on PowerPC and an uninstallable one for many users. -Nathan
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