Re: FreeBSD support

[Daniel Kiper]

Hi Eric,

On Sat, Oct 12, 2019 at 09:41:50AM -0400, Eric McCorkle wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I finally got a chance to resume work on FreeBSD support recently.
> Here's where things are:
>
> * I can boot on an EFI platform, however, the efifb driver never turns
> the screen on, so the screen is blank until the X11 DRM driver takes
> over (I know why this is, see below)
>
> * grub_install doesn't properly detect what modules to link into the
> image, so you have to manually tell it to load whatever you need to
> detect the filesystem (ex: zfs, ufs, bsd, etc)
>
>
> Other than that, everything is fine as far as I can tell.
>
> As for the screen issue, it comes down to a change that I'm looking into
> making.  The FreeBSD kernel has the ability to send data into the kernel
> using what amounts to synthetic loadable modules.  It creates ELF images
> containing the data synthetically in memory.
>
> This capacity is used in two ways with an EFI boot: to send EFI terminal
> data to the efifb driver, and to pass keys from the loader to the
> kernel.  The latter is only used for GELI for now, with the older
> environment variable method being supported but deprecated.  The EFI
> terminal data used to be send in via environment variables, but that was
> replaced with the synthetic modules method.
>
> So basically, I need to implement the synthetic modules functionality in
> GRUB, assuming it already doesn't exist.
>
> As for the grub_install problem, I suspect that's just a matter of
> debugging it on FreeBSD.

Thank you for doing the work. I am looking forward for your patches.

Daniel