Re: [RFC] Deprecation and removal of the drm2 driver

From: Glen Barber <gjb_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2018 16:02:34 +0000
On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 08:22:12AM -0700, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> > On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 11:48:38AM +0200, Philip Homburg wrote:
> > > >Also as the Moore's law curve flattens expect the life of these
> > > >older, but not so old, machines to live quiet some time.  I
> > > >believe we are talking sandy bridge and earlier?  If that is
> > > >corret Sandy bridge is still a very viable system.
> > > 
> > > I noticed this lack of love for older systems recently. 
> > > 
> > > I wanted to use an older Dell server to test the 11.2 BETAs and RCs.
> > > 
> > > Turns out, you can't install FreeBSD using a USB stick image because the
> > > BIOS only support MBR. No idea why MBR support was dropped for the USB images.
> > > 
> > > In the end I had to find a CD burner, and after a couple of tries managed to
> > > install from CD.
> > > 
> > > After that, my ansible playbooks started failing because /boot/loader.conf 
> > > is absent if you boot from zfs in combination with MBR.
> > > 
> > > Pity. This older server hardware is great for trying out new releases, play 
> > > with zfs, etc.
> > 
> > The disc1.iso (as well as bootonly.iso and dvd1.iso) images are now
> > built as hybrid images, supporting both MBR and GPT, as well as being
> > written to a flash drive (like memstick.img) as well as a CD.
> 
> To clarify a minor point here, are the amd64 disc1.iso images or
> both the amd64 and i386 disk1.iso images being built as "hybrid"?
> 

Only amd64.  i386 does not have UEFI-/GPT-related boot issues.

> As this is what I see on my system:
> root_at_x230a:/home/ISO/x # file FreeBSD-11.2-BETA2-*
> FreeBSD-11.2-BETA2-amd64-disc1.iso: DOS/MBR boot sector; partition 1 : ID=0xee, start-CHS (0x0,0,2), end-CHS (0x3ff,255,63), startsector 1, 1472695 sectors
> FreeBSD-11.2-BETA2-i386-disc1.iso:  ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data '11_2_BETA2_I386_CD' (bootable)
> 
> > MBR support was initially removed from the memstick installer, as it is
> > not compatible with some UEFI implementations.  (Or, at least that is my
> > understanding, based on my limited intimate knowledge of UEFI.)
> > 

Glen


Received on Thu May 24 2018 - 14:02:37 UTC

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