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Old 2nd September 2015
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Default Native EFI booting coming to OpenBSD

More exciting work from the developers:

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=artic...20150902074526

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Old 12th September 2015
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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I booted a -current miniroot58.fs from a USB stick after setting the hardware to boot in UEFI mode, because I wanted to see the new bootloader work.

There are two MBR partitions in the new install58.fs and miniroot58.fs disk images.
  • Partition #3 is the standard OpenBSD MBR partition (type A6), and the image contains a standard MBR bootloader.
  • There is now an added partition #0, the EFI boot partition (type EF), which is a FAT partition containing the EFI boot blocks and bootloader. which will be used if booting in EFI mode.
My BIOS configuration has two boot modes: UEFI and "Legacy," which is also known as Compatibility Support Mode (CSM) on systems that boot using EFI/UEFI. "Legacy" is a great way to describe the BIOS on i386/amd64 architecture systems, as it has remained the same since the original IBM PC. That BIOS was ported from the IBM 5150 (Intel 8088) and that is a 16-bit, 1MB RAM architecture. This limits BIOS services to bootloaders, such as sector address limits when reading from disk drives.
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Old 12th September 2015
e1-531g e1-531g is offline
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One one hand BIOS have been designed for really old hardware. On the other hand UEFI is more complex and there were shown some vulnerabilities that can be used for persistent malware infection.
Newerthless UEFI powers almost every new PC today and is going to power ARMv8 servers too, so IMHO it is good that OpenBSD adapts to this.
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Old 15th September 2015
ocicat ocicat is offline
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One of the project developers has posted a great blog post on booting UEFI systems:

http://blog.jasper.la/openbsd-uefi-bootloader-howto/

Last edited by ocicat; 15th September 2015 at 03:52 PM. Reason: spelling
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Old 15th September 2015
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I played with it. This amd64 system is one where inteldrm(4) is not available, and I tried both vesa(4) and wsfb(4) ... both worked.

Now I'm back on "legacy" BIOS, where I have full functionality.

GPT is now available for testing and breaking by those with greater that 2TB disks. I'd play with it but I don't have any large drives and I don't have GPT provisioning tools handy. (At the moment, fdisk(8) can create a protective MBR but not provision GPT.)
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Old 16th September 2015
NaWi NaWi is offline
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Jaspers blogpost worked on a Shuttle XS35V4. Only the install58.fs boots (not the miniroot58.fs and, also not the install58.iso). X doesn't worked... haven't played around because it was deepest night ...
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Old 16th September 2015
e1-531g e1-531g is offline
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@jggimi
You don't need to have large HDD to play with GPT. I had 500GB HDD and used this for about one year. On HDD there were Windows 8.1 64bit and Linux.
GPT is more flexible than MBR because you can have a lot of PC partitions. On MBR only 4 primary partitions. On the other hand GPT doesn't support boot flag, so you must (unless you play with hybrid MBR) use EFI partition, which in turn requires motherboard firmware to be fairly sophisticated, because it must support FAT filesystem.
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Old 16th September 2015
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NaWi View Post
X doesn't worked..
To use vesa(4) you must set the aperture driver to 2. See the xf86(4) man page.
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Old 16th September 2015
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Quote:
Originally Posted by e1-531g View Post
@jggimi
You don't need to have large HDD to play with GPT..
True, but there was a call for testing of > 2 TB drives in that link.
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Old 16th September 2015
NaWi NaWi is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jggimi View Post
To use vesa(4) you must set the aperture driver to 2. See the xf86(4) man page.
Thanks for the info, I will give it a try today. I played around yesterday and was happy that this box boots and, that there is a chance to stay away from penguins.
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Old 17th September 2015
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jggimi View Post
... I don't have GPT provisioning tools handy...
They're coming, per Ken Westerback's Hackathon report.
Quote:
Originally Posted by krw@
I also worked a lot on uncommited changes to fdisk(8) to support better GPT initialization and GPT editing. Now that the kernel GPT appears stable this is something that will get much more attention.
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