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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