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Old 13th September 2011
marcv marcv is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2011
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BSDfan666 View Post
x86 bootloaders make a lot of assumptions about the state the system is in when the BIOS passes control over to it.. legacy structures in memory, register contents, and how other legacy hardware is configured.

I guess when this system goes to the F12 menu it takes some extra precautions to ensure the legacy environment is more compatible.. it's really hard to say why.
Yes - I can understand that a bootloader is complex.

Quote:
A lot of newer x86 firmware is actually UEFI/EFI with legacy BIOS emulation as a module.

It's definitely frustrating, and it may indeed be a bug in OpenBSD's bootloader, however it does boot on a large amount of systems.. the problem is likely pretty obscure and will be difficult to hunt down, contacting a developer who has recently committed in that area may be able to help isolate it.
Since all the linux distros I used do work would it be a viable option to compare their assumptions of the BIOS state against OpenBSD maybe?

Or for that matter 'dump' the BIOS state(s), registers, ... in say /var/crash and then kick off the second stage boot. If that crashes, we still have the contents saved there and can compare it against a 'good' run where I used F12.

But then I definitvely need guidance from a developer to tell me how to save the BIOS states ...

Regards,

Marc
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