Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 17:43:31 +0100 From: Keve <keve@keve.hu> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: ipxe + EFI loading FreeBSD - should/will this work? Message-ID: <45199144-8228-f661-bb2e-5a55861dfe34@keve.hu>
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Hi, I am booting several different OSes cleanly with ipxe (http://ipxe.org) in both physical as well as virtual environments. The only system resisting so far is FreeBSD. I can easily boot it from iso (e.g. the excellent mfsbsd isos), but this reduces flexibility in giving kernel command line arguments, etc. ipxe can boot multiboot kernels on x86, there are traces of multiboot in FreeBSD, but I have not succeeded in getting it up. ipxe lacks direct support for loading the FreeBSD kernel. With the advent of loader.efi I have tried my luck again - with moderate success. On amd64 I can boot loader.efi as the "kernel" passing kernel command line arguments, but any attempt to pass an initial ramdisk fails. I tried passing no initrd, a small UFS (40MB) with /boot, a small disk image with gpt freebsd-ufs partition (50MB), a big UFS (mfsroot), but I consistently get the same result: * "Found 1 disk(s) but no logical partition" message, "can't load 'kernel'" * lsdev shows only the network card * loader.efi tries to nfs mount / on the tftp-server The whole point of my investigation was to avoid the nfs-root by providing a memory disk. Hence my questions: Am I missing something in my approach above (some parameter to loader.efi that will make it use the memory disk) or some other magic to use the memory disk as the root filesystem? Are you considering to enrich loader.efi to be able to work with an initial ramdisk, if yes, where can I sign up to support the process? Any guidance on how to proceed, what to try is highly appreciated. Thx. Cheers, Keve
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