[nycbug-talk] freebsd and gpt

[Miles Nordin]

>>>>> "il" == Isaac Levy <ike at lesmuug.org> writes:

    il> - if you are trying to install on a volume greater than 2TB
    il> (currently not a task for newbies, or even most users)

maybe CentOS is more worried about this than freebsd because they also
support LVM2 in their installer (<pssssss>, oh that's gotta _hurt_!),
so it's quite reasonable to have a volume bigger than 2TB, while on
FreeBSD geom must be used from the command line.

Also CentOS have many stable filesystems for volumes that big, while
in FreeBSD the stable filesystem is FFS2+softdep which still has to
fsck (albeit in the background) after unclean shutdown, and fsck is
O(n^2) so it might work but it's certainly not ideal on such a large
volume.  Anyone run a 2TB FFS+softdep volume?  ZFS scrub is O(n) but
ZFS is not stable.  :p

    il> - if you have a machine with GPT already installed via Linux
    il> or other OS

-or-

        - if, before committing to your platform, you want to know if
          the stable branch keeps up-to-date with market conditions,
          because you want to use it for actual work other than
          recompiling itself without wasting huge amounts of time on
          it.

The huge waste of time tracking down the right versions of tiny
packages and reading HOWTO's for working around unfixed problems is
what drove me from Linux to BSD in the first place.  It's not a newbie
issue.  

I do agree with Ike that Linux people have always come to BSD and
complain about the installer, because Linux is overfocused on
installers.  Isn't the CentOS installer is an X11 app?!  More than
half the time I don't even use the BSD installer---I boot an
NFS-rooted system and use pax to install, Gentoo-style.  I'd much
rather have BSD's whole-system build script that delivers .tar.gz's
and .iso's than Linux's X11 installer.

but yeah I'm not sure gpt support in sysinst makes sense without some
geom wizard like CentOS's in there as well.  so long as booting is
supported in the _stable_ loader, not some prerelease HEAD garbage,
that doesn't increase my marginal worry for my last '-' point, but, is
it really?  or is the PR you filed to fix the broken loader?  
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