Filesystem option during install

[gpatrick]

At one time Sun Microsystems had a version of Solaris called SXCE (Solaris Express Community Edition) that gave the option of choosing either UFS or ZFS during installation.

Certainly not everyone wishes to use ZFS and not everyone wants to use UFS, so it seems like a feasible solution. I was under the impression that PC-BSD already does this.

What technical hurdles preclude FreeBSD from implementing that feature?

 

[wblock@]

There is no technical reason this can't be done. The hard part is presenting the choices in partitioning and disk layout (mirror, RAID-Z, root on ZFS or on UFS) in a way that makes sense to the user.

 

[SirDice]

The entire installer was replaced for 9.x. The old sysinstall(8) didn't have it and it was very difficult to add features to it. The new bsdinstall(8) aims to solve a lot of those issues and make it easier to add features like this. There's still quite some work to be done but as @wblock@ said, there are no technical reasons why it can't be added. It's probably just a matter of finding somebody willing to put in the time and effort.

 

[blazingice]

How easy is it to incorporate PC-BSD's backend layer into bsdinstall(8)()? Their zfs installation is fairly good when using pc-sysinstall.cfg.

According to the recent FreeBSD foundation newsletter, this needs improving. Quoting from "Design for Human and Programmatic Use" section:

From PCBSD to my employer Spectra Logic's appliances, the successful user experience is provided by code layered on top of FreeBSD. There is nothing wrong with this strategy, but because programmatic use is not designed into FreeBSD, it is difficult to create a simple or robust management framework.

Even when these management frameworks work well 99% of the time, it is often impossible for a human that understands the base system to make a simple change.

Does this mean that it might take ages before we can see this kind of improvement into base system?