I have walked all over Paul Richards code again, and severely lobotomized
some of his stuff, in order to cut some corners for the 2.0-Alpha release.
I belive that we can now manipulate fdisk and disklabel-stuff sufficiently
for the release to actually be produced.
It's not that I don't like Paul and his code, I just need something I
can kick out of the door RSN.
Sysinstall is now under absolute code-freeze, only Jordan has my permission
to commit to this code (stage0 & 5). I would appreciate if everybody
else would finds problems in sysinstall send patches to me, and I will
commit them. THANKYOU.
The fdisk/disklabel editors are made in pure ncurses, and follow a model
"a`la spreadsheet".
There are some important functions which are missing still, and I would
appreciate if somebody would look at them.
The FDISK part needs a "whole-disk" option, and it needs a "rewrite
MBR-boot code" option.
The DISKLABEL part needs to be able to "import DOS-partition".
Both need a "HELP" function, (display a file "/HELP" using dialog is OK).
It seems to me like the wd.c and sd.c should reread the physical record
when a DIOCGDINFO is made, so that they can pick up changes in the
MBR-data. Otherwise there will be a couple of weird cases where we
cannot avoid replicating code from the kernel.
If you want to play with this, look at src/release/Makefile. You may need
to step back to version 1.38 of sys/i386/isa/fd.c to make "rootable"
floppies, it is not clear at this time if that indeed is the problem I
have been having.
Sleep well, my friends, and expect the real Alpha in 24H, if the tree is
still solid.
All the mbr code now seems to be working. We can build a basic
unix disklabel in any existing DOS partition while retaining the
existing mbr bootcode or we can install to the whole disk which
puts FreeBSD's boot code into the MBR and creates a clean MBR
partition table with FreeBSD in partition 0 taking up the whole disk.
Poul-Henning Kamp
Paul Richards