5 Extensibility

5.1 Creating Customized Boot floppies

Many sites have complex requirements that may require additional kernel modules or userland tools be added to the installation floppies. The ``quick and dirty'' way to accomplish this would be to modify the staging directory of an existing make release build hierarchy:

• Apply patches or add additional files inside the chroot release build directory.

• rm ${CHROOTDIR}/usr/obj/usr/src/release/release.[48]

• rebuild sysinstall(8), the kernel, or whatever parts of the system your change affected.

• chroot ${CHROOTDIR} ./mk release.4

• chroot ${CHROOTDIR} ./mk release.8

New release floppies will be located in ${CHROOTDIR}/R/stage/floppies.

Alternatively, the boot.flp make target can be called, or the filesystem creating script, src/release/scripts/doFS.sh, may be invoked directly.

Local patches may also be supplied to the release build by defining the LOCAL_PATCH variable in make release.

5.2 Scripting sysinstall

The FreeBSD system installation and configuration tool, sysinstall(8), can be scripted to provide automated installs for large sites. This functionality can be used in conjunction with Intel's PXE[13] to bootstrap systems from the network, or via custom boot floppies with a sysinstall script. An example sysinstall script is available in the CVS tree as src/release/sysinstall/install.cfg.