Re: FreeBSD and Coreboot

On 2019-05-27 15:50, Eric McCorkle wrote:
> On 5/27/19 5:53 PM, Edward Napierala wrote:
>> On Mon, 27 May 2019 at 16:14, Eric McCorkle <eric_at_metricspace.net> wrote:
>>
>> [..]
>>
>>> My plan is roughly this:
>>>
>>> * Refurbish the GRUB port, get it working again in QEMU (possibly on one
>>> of my machines), also possibly push a patch to GRUB to use the keybufs
>>> mechanism to pass in GELI keys.
>>>
>>> * Get coreboot with GRUB/Seabios booting FreeBSD in QEMU
>>>
>>> * Possibly create a coreboot port (uncertain how this would work, since
>>> Coreboot has its own extensive config menu)
>>>
>>> * Hold my breath and test it out on real hardware (I have a Librem 13 r1
>>> for this purpose)
>>>
>>> * Possibly try getting the FreeBSD kernel to work as a coreboot payload.
>> Out of curiosity - why the kernel and not loader(8)?
>>
> If I understand coreboot correctly, loader would have to directly
> manipulate devices _without a BIOS_.  That is, it would have to have an
> entire device detection/interface layer, which I don't believe is the
> case today.
>
> At least in the EFI case, loader is talking through the system's EFI
> implementation, which takes care of all that for you.  BIOS works in a
> similar way.  My sense is getting loader to the point where it could be
> a coreboot (without Seabios/GRUB/Tianocore) would be quite an undertaking.
>

On IBM PowerNV systems, which also don't provide interfaces to a
second-stage loader, we just abandoned loader(8). It's way too much work.
-Nathan