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A critical look at NetBSD’s installer
[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.] This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2025/installing_bsd_…
It’s definitely useful to be able to switch to GB when partitioning large drives (and I guess due to the portability aspect of NetBSD it may make sense for some architectures to allow entering sectors or cylinders for more control). On one machine it took incredibly long – the modules.txr.xz set alone took half an hour with the installation at times going to as slow writes as roughly 4 KiB/s or even stalling entirely. This little experiment proved useful, though, as it revealed a portion of sysinst that I had not seen before: The installer told me that this machine didn’t provide strong entropy and gave me several options for dealing with that.
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