Created attachment 151082 [details] screenshot of the disk info tab When doing a ZFS install, selecting the 'Disk Info' tab lists the md0/md1 devices that are just temporary ramdisks used during installation. This is a bit confusing: perhaps they could be filtered out as they seem to be when selecting the pool type. (seen with the FreeBSD-11.0-CURRENT-amd64-20141222-r276066-disc1.iso snapshot).
We had those masked at one point. I'll look into it. Most of this functionality comes from bsdconfig
Allan had indicated he would look at it.
This functionality uses f_device_menu from bsdconfig It shows every device that GEOM knows about. It would be nice to be able to filter the results. Maybe f_device_menu() could be changed (or cloned with a new name) a bit to take the result of f_device_find() as its parameter, instead of the device type, so we could filter out specific devices before drawing the menu.
I'm biased. GEOM correctly classifies md(4) as disks. Why should we prevent someone from creating an installation out of these devices? I can think of several reasons why it might be helpful to be able to perform an installation to md(4) devices. Removing or filtering-out these devices may seem like it's preventing a silly situation but I tend to believe it prevents clever applications.
It seems probably more complicated than need be, but I think we should at least filter out the md devices that are created by the installer. The function being called, by the function being called by bsdinstall, has a filter option, but that is not exposed to bsdinstall.
Can I close as 'Works as Intended'? Someone might want to do an "mdconfig -f" on a bunch of files creating a bunch of md(4) devices, and then create a ZFS pool out of those devices.