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Date:      Wed, 23 Oct 2024 17:37:17 -0700
From:      Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com>
To:        Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
Cc:        "freebsd-arch@freebsd.org" <freebsd-arch@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: BIOS back to Text Only by default
Message-ID:  <CAK7dMtCb4SiBHaGE5OZhf%2B%2BqRSyy5Spp2iSxT84b6MwJeVu-2g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfpi=Tg7YiY1Zo39D0qfJB093ttx7-=5sLTaUx4oyj8Jzw@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <CANCZdfpi=Tg7YiY1Zo39D0qfJB093ttx7-=5sLTaUx4oyj8Jzw@mail.gmail.com>

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On Sat, Oct 19, 2024 at 12:36=E2=80=AFPM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote=
:
>
> Greetings,
>
> A while ago, I removed GZIP and BZIP2 support from the boot loader by def=
ault to get it to fit into the space available for BIOS booting with the lu=
a interpreter for PXE booting.
>
> This made it into the 13.4 Release. Some downstream distributions started=
 needing to build their own loader for this release. Their MFS setup relied=
 on either gzip or bzip2 files working and my changes broke that.
>
> After talking with people at places like EuroBSDcon, irc and Discord, I t=
hink I'll take Mark Johnson's idea of moving back to a Text-only boot loade=
r for BIOS by default, and putting these two options back into the loader. =
 When we do this, the loader shrinks 20k net (-40k for graphical loader, +2=
0k for decompression).
>
> My thoughts are that you can boot either with the graphical or text-only =
loader. There's no real functional difference, apart from aesthetics. While=
 they are nice to have, when space is tight, we should bias towards keeping=
 functional things over keeping things that are just pretty when we need to=
 make a choice.
>
> EFI booting remains unchanged.
>
> I'd like to get this in over the next week or so. I'm soliciting comments=
 on this idea. I've created https://reviews.freebsd.org/D47203 for this cha=
nge. I've not regenerated the options docs yet, but I'll do that as well.
>
> Comments?

I feel like that is a fair tradeoff to keep BIOS boot alive with other
space constraints.

As an anecdote I do have some still useful (to me) Westmere Xeon
servers that are not UEFI capable and make use of gptzfsboot and would
like to run them through 15.x.

> Warner



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