Re: Apropos Removal of sysinstall

On 12/29/11 04:34, Mark Blackman wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 29 Dec 2011, Peter J. Cherny wrote:
>> I believe removal of sysinstall exposes the community's blindness to a
>> major parts of it's future, ZFS root.
>>
>> Other than following arcane recipes,
>> the only way to create a system with ZFS root is by using Martin
>> Matu?ka's excellent mfsboot images.
>>
>> Where are the plans for making this functionality mainstream ?
>
> What's stopping this? lack of effort/time or consensus?
> I know it's a volunteer project and there's lots of resource constraints,
> but ZFS on root seems like such a no-brainer that I can only assume it's
> quite hard or nobody has quite decided what it should look like.

It's not very hard. Several people volunteered to do this a long time 
ago, and for reasons of time, I guess, it didn't happen or wasn't 
finished. Since they were doing it, it was silly for other people to 
work on it, and so here we are. Maybe this discussion will prompt 
patches. What needs to be done is the following:
- Write a zfs_ops.c file as an analog to gpart_ops.c in 
src/usr.sbin/bsdinstall/partedit that implements the Add/Delete/Modify 
buttons for ZFS filesystems in zpools. Some logic to avoid touching the 
disks until the user presses finish is also necessary.
- Write some code to show ZFS file systems in zpools in the main 
partition editor screen, like the existing gpart walk code
- Code to add partitions to zpools (probably just check for freebsd-zfs 
type and then use the mountpoint as the zpool name or something) when 
they are created.

I unfortunately don't have much FreeBSD time at the moment, so can't 
complete this. But I will very, very happily provide advice and 
integrate patches.
-Nathan