Re: CTF: UEFI HTTP boot support

> I've been trying out FreeBSD with raspberry Pi4 (4GB) and wanted to see
> what the state of HTTP BOOT is in FreeBSD, so I bumped into this!
> 
> I'm curious if it should be possible to point to a img/iso directly (I
> tried to use the img.xz unpacked it and make it available on a local web
> server and that didn't seem to work for me)  but maybe thats cause those
> images miss something, so arm64 aside does that work for amd64? I.E. using
> the bootonly.iso?

One problem you run into in attemtping this is even if you get an
image downloaded and started that image is being provided by some
memory device driver that emulates some type of iso device.
FreeBSD does not have a driver for that device so once the kernel
gets to the point of mounting its root file system it falls on
its face with a mountroot failure.

> 
> And on the other hand is there any doc on how to set up dhcp/http specific
> to FreeBSD similar to https://en.opensuse.org/UEFI_HTTPBoot_Server_Setup?

Since Linux uses this idea of a kernel payload and an initrd payload
to boot with it is much easier to get these 2 things over the network
and then have a workable system.  FreeBSD does not have the initrd
payload and that complicates things, you need a functionaly filesystem
avaliable at the end of kernel initilization.
> 
> I looked into https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/network-diskless.html
> but that doesn't seem to be up to date (or at least it focuses only on PXE
> and TFTP).

Yes, old but workable.  I have a more advanced system that supports NFS
booting using NFS support in PXE.  The only thing done via tftp is to
upgrade the PXE running on the client to one that speaks NFS, then the
kernel is loaded via NFS and the root file system is later provided
via NFS.  The use of NFS provides very fast boots, and I do not need
a web server to do it :-).

> For clarification my ultimate goal is to use a few pi4's as "thin clients",
> so eventually I will have to setup an image of the system with the needed
> software (freerdp) but for starters I just wanted to check if pointing
> directly to a img/iso would work and that does not seem to be the case.

I would strongly suggest use of NFS instead of trying to provide an
ISO image, as you no longer need to store the ISO in memory on the
client box, and with a pi4 your already memory contrained.

> Thanks.
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-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes_at_freebsd.org