booting current from nano-neo/allwinner now failes

[Ian Lepore]

On Thu, 2018-08-02 at 18:55 +0100, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 2, 2018, 5:39 PM Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > On Thu, 2018-08-02 at 19:31 +0300, Daniel Braniss wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > On 2 Aug 2018, at 19:26, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > Try the latest ubldr
> > > >  There was a change in the last day that should fix this..
> > > > 
> > > I thought I had the latest, will try again.
> > > BTW, I only updated the u-boot, and now it’s trying to boot via
> > > the
> > > net!, and the ether is actually working,
> > > i’ll compile a kernel with nfs root support …
> > > 
> > > thanks,
> > >       danny
> > > 
> > Well, no, it's failing to boot via net, and if it's modern uboot,
> > it
> > will always fail. There is a "net device" in ubldr, but when it
> > tries
> > to probe, uboot fails to respond, because CONFIG_API no longer
> > supports
> > network devices in modern uboot that uses DM (Device Manager).
> > 
> > The only way to netboot with modern uboot is via UEFI.
> > Unfortunately,
> > you don't get the kind of local control that ubldr provided; the
> > boot
> > parameters (where to find the root filesystem, etc) must come from
> > the
> > dhcp/bootp server. That's a bit of a showstopper for many folks who
> > don't have that level of control over the dhcp server config.
> > 
> Is that a UEFI issue. Or our loader.efi needs X, Y or Z?
> 
> Warner

With ubldr you set a uboot env var (rootpath) and it gets used instead
of anything coming over the wire from the server (it's important that a
locally-set value overrides dhcp/bootp values, because the server you
can't control may deliver insane values).

>From what I've heard, the uboot uefi implementation doesn't give you a
way to save persistent efi vars, so right now there's no way to set a
local rootpath var. If we had persistent vars, I guess the thing to do
would be to define a standard freebsd-specific variable to set the
rootpath.

-- Ian