Re: CTF: UEFI HTTP boot support

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 17:53 Miguel C <miguelmclara_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 4:35 PM Rodney W. Grimes <
> freebsd-rwg_at_gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> wrote:
>
> > > 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 for the tips, but I was really looking for HTTP BOOT info no NFS,
> that's why I replied to this thread.
>
> I might look into that at some point if HTTP BOOT is not an option of
> course, but this thread is about a Call for Testers for UEFI HTTP BOOT, not
> NFS and I would like to help test, the pi4 project just conveniently
> touches on the same use case (an it also does have support for http boot
> using https://rpi4-uefi.dev/) so I'm curious if I can test that way.
>
> Other than the iso I can ofc attempt the dhcp+dns+webserver setup but for
> that I would need a bit more guidance as the linked URL here is linux
> centric, hence why some docs would help.
>

>
>
Am I just misremembering or can't you get freebsd to load an mfsroot-image,
which can act as rw fs ?

I seem to remember pc-bsd DVDs using this say 7 years ago.

You would of course have to modify/build your own iso image with the
mfsroot-image on it.

Best regards
Andreas