On 02/18/11 22:11, Shawn Webb wrote:
There are many reasons for this, and none of them are selfish (although it
remains possible to drum-up some selfish reason, all of the reasons behind
our motivation are in-fact unselfish). Truth-be-told, I welcome the
replacement of sysinstall but am very wary that ANY replacement will be able
to exactly replicate the hardware compatibility that sysinstall currently
enjoys. I do indeed envision a great celebration as FreeBSD-9 bucks
sysinstall but also at the same time have nightmares of receiving waves of
calls from people having trouble (for example) "installing FreeBSD-9 on
their AMD K6 based system, circa long-long-ago in a universe far-far-away."
(yes, we do have data centers running that very equipment with uptime in the
1,000's of days).
I'm sure I'm not fully aware of the situation at your data center, but would
systems that have 1,000+ day uptimes be candidates for upgrade to FreeBSD 9?
It seems that if a system has that kind of uptime, it's a high priority
server and uptime needs to be maintained.
Maybe it would be possible to have both sysinstall and bsdinstall on the
same install medium?
It may. If it is possible without enormous difficulty, this is something
that should certainly be in place for 9.0. If it isn't possible, it may
be a good idea to provide a second set of media with sysinstall for
those who want it. I think that in any case, it is extremely unlikely
that sysinstall will be entirely disconnected from the build before the
release.
As regards the original posting, I totally share Devin's concern about
wide hardware compatibility, including with very old hardware, and wish
him the best of luck with sysinstall life support! As for bsdinstall, I
have taken a substantial amount of effort to ensure that bsdinstall work
on older hardware (I have tested it on a VT220 at 9600 baud connected to
a 13-year-old Sun Ultra 5) and would regard it failing in any way on any
hardware on which FreeBSD will boot as a serious bug.
-Nathan
_______________________________________________
freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
