GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Code-in 2012 The NetBSD Project

Describe what a NetBSD installation does

completed by: wmzhere

mentors: Aleksej Saushev, Jeff Rizzo, Julian Fagir, Julian Coleman

NetBSD has an installer called sysinst. But for several cases installations are not run from a system with a direct interface, but rather something else where you don't have sysinst available. Imagine an installation in a chroot environment, an automated installation, with another interface (e.g. ssh), etc.


For all these issues, it is necessary to know what a NetBSD installation exactly does. You have to look at the code of sysinst and document what it does in which step, and what is necessary to get a system running.

Our preferred format for the submission is some form of plain text, as that is most portable and can be read anywhere.  If you want to use a word processor, please export the file as text.  You could also add something like markdown or latex to add structure (these are both plain text based), but that is not a requirement.

There has been a discussion on a mailing-list about this: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-install/2012/10/21/msg000345.html 

Aleksej Saushev created a script for this. You mainly have to read the script, compare the results against what you read in sysinst, and then elaborate what the script does. You should make clean the steps it takes and why it takes them.