Re: HEADS UP: sysinstall is no longer the default installer

From: Marcel Moolenaar <xcllnt_at_mac.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:05:11 -0700
On Mar 18, 2011, at 6:51 PM, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:

> On 03/15/11 12:20, Marcel Moolenaar wrote:
>> On Mar 14, 2011, at 7:13 AM, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>> 
>>> I just committed (r219641) changes that make the release infrastructure (src/release/Makefile) use bsdinstall by default instead of sysinstall on install media. A big thank you is in order to everyone who provided advice, criticism, and testing for this project over the last few months!
>> Thanks Nathan,
>> 
>> I checked ia64 and it works well enough. I may come back with a tweak
>> here and there after the dust settles, but so far it's more reliable
>> (and a while lot simpler) than sysinstall is.
>> 
>> Great work!
> 
> Thanks! The installer doesn't yet know (and I don't know) how to set up the EFI system partition on IA64, so I'll need some input (or code) from you on that point to get things totally up and running.

It's not that hard in general: create a partition that is 100MB in size,
give it the right type (i.e. C12A7328-F81F-11d2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B) and
format with dosfs. This has to be the very first partition on a boot
device.

As part of the installation, we need to copy the EFI loader to a FreeBSD
subdirectory. Adding an entry for FreeBSD to the boot menu is where it
really gets interesting. The support for writing the EFI environment exists
(see libefi), but construction an EFI device path from a device special file
probably needs some more code. Getting that to work is interesting for
installing on Intel based Apple hardware as well I would presume.

Most systems have a system partition, so copying the loader to it is the
most important aspect of getting a bootable installation.

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
xcllnt_at_mac.com
Received on Sat Mar 19 2011 - 04:05:16 UTC

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