Re: debian-installer for GNU/kFreeBSD
Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net> writes:
> Following the work of Luca Favetella [1] during the Google Summer of
> Code [2], I am happy to announce that a first version of the
> debian-installer images are available here:
>
> http://temp.aurel32.net/d-i-kfreebsd/
>
> Here are the SHA512 of the two images:
>
> 754ab22022868a441e76c71d5a5c32b1bb0d5cb46ad7d8ca8da8b01bb5796d246bac34ad101d4f5c2e14798d526bbe93066207e1467efdbde59ccd72254129ce mini-kfreebsd-amd64-20090831.iso
> c1bfa136ce6caabf39dba989fde08b3388d92754fdd14c71079a3fa5f5ba2938a6f82df899e6c34ae1ef2646e15e4046683ee76544875c670296f0fa0f3b3045 mini-kfreebsd-i386-20090831.iso
>
> Please test them and report problems here. If there are not too many
> issues, we will make an official release, put the images on the
> standard location [3] and make a wider announce (probably with "Bits
> from GNU/kFreeBSD porters" on debian-devel-announce). You can find more
> details about those images, including bugs or missing features, on the
> wiki [4].
I just tried the AMD64 flavour on a kvm virtual machine. Most of the
issues I noticed seem to already be documented:
- installation report fails
- keyboard configuration missing
Apart from that, the only problem I had was enabling the serial console.
But that might be due to me not knowing FreeBSD too well. The installer
worked nicely, except for the already documented missing features.
More details:
I installed using this command line:
kvm -m 512 -usb -hda debian-kfreebsd.base.raw -net nic,vlan=0,macaddr=00:aa:00:ff:00:fb -net vde,vlan=0,sock=/var/run/vde2/tap0.ctl -serial mon:stdio -monitor null -cdrom mini-kfreebsd-amd64-20090831.iso -boot d
Original plan was to use serial console only, but this seems to be
unsupported (probably more of a generic d-i problem). Also meant to use
an e1000 NIC but forgot to specify it. That caused a minor problem when I
remembered it afterwords, as the primary NIC was renamed from re0 to em0.
But that is of course to be expected with FreeBSD and obviously an user
error anyway...
Serial console woes:
/etc/inittab had a couple of commented out lines as usual, so I just
uncommented the first in the belief that the device name was correct:
# Example how to put a getty on a serial line (for a terminal)
#
#T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L cuaa0 9600 vt100
But this ended up with
INIT: Id "T0" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
So I looked around in /dev/ for other possibilities, and remembered that
JUNOS routers (which are the only FreeBSD machines I've ever used before
:-) use ttyd0. And this seems to work fine:
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyd0 9600 vt100
But that posed another minor problem: ttyd0 was not in /etc/securetty so
I couldn't log in as root on the console. Easily fixed of course. but
makes me wonder: Did I do something wrong, or are both /etc/inittab and
/etc/securetty really using the wrong serial console device names?
Then came the attempt to configure grub for serial console: Getting
grub itself to use is of course the same as with Linux:
GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES=serial
GRUB_TERMINAL=serial
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --unit=0 --speed=9600"
But how am I supposed to make the freebsd kernel use it? Adding "-h" on
the kernel command line maybe? But there does not seem to be any way to
do that using /etc/grub.d/10_freebsd. Or am I missing the obvious?
Hmm, maybe the missing feature "support for boot options". Right.
For now, I've just added a static copy of the automatic configuration
with the command line parameter, but this is of course not a good
solution.
BTW, while looking for docs, I noticed this weird path:
kvm-kfreebsd:~# dpkg -L kfreebsd-image-7.2-1-amd64|grep home
/usr/share/doc/home
/usr/share/doc/home/aurel32
/usr/share/doc/home/aurel32/tmp
/usr/share/doc/home/aurel32/tmp/kernel
/usr/share/doc/home/aurel32/tmp/kernel/kfreebsd-7-7.2
/usr/share/doc/home/aurel32/tmp/kernel/kfreebsd-7-7.2/debian
/usr/share/doc/home/aurel32/tmp/kernel/kfreebsd-7-7.2/debian/kfreebsd-image-7.2-1-amd64
/usr/share/doc/home/aurel32/tmp/kernel/kfreebsd-7-7.2/debian/kfreebsd-image-7.2-1-amd64/README.Debian
Guess that's not supposed to happen :-)
Bjørn
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