Boot manager beep (revisited)

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2006-04-30 22:34, Eric Anderson <anderson at centtech.com> wrote:
> This thread:
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2005-December/020572.html
>
> mentions a patch to disable the boot manager beep, and also
> discusses having it optional.  I don't have enough asm-fu to make
> that option happen, but I can tell you, that on laptops, that beep
> is really annoying, and amazingly loud.  Is this just waiting for an
> able minded person to code up the options and submit?

I don't like the beep either, so I usually patch my systems manually
to include something very similar:

# Index: boot0.S
# ===================================================================
# --- boot0.S     (.../branches/ncvs/src/sys/boot/i386/boot0)     (revision 45)
# +++ boot0.S     (.../trunk/src/sys/boot/i386/boot0)     (revision 45)
# @@ -201,9 +201,7 @@
#  /*
#   * Start of input loop.  Beep and take note of time
#   */
# -main.10:       movb $ASCII_BEL,%al             # Signal
# -               callw putchr                    #  beep!
# -               xorb %ah,%ah                    # BIOS: Get
# +main.10:       xorb %ah,%ah                    # BIOS: Get
#                 int $0x1a                       #  system time
#                 movw %dx,%di                    # Ticks when
#                 addw _TICKS(%bp),%di            #  timeout

Since this is asm, and it runs very very early in the boot process, we
don't have the luxury of making this tunable in `/boot/loader.conf',
but there's nothing wrong with making it tunable through an option in
our modern `/etc/src.conf' option system.  We could use something like
the following:

	WITHOUT_BOOTEASY_BEEP=	yes

and then we can add the necessary Makefile-foo in `/usr/src/sys/boot'
to turn this to a preprocessor #define.

Does something like the following sound reasonable (I haven't had a
chance to run this through a build-test, so use with care).  The
default behavior should be to *include* a beep, but it can be turned
off by setting WITHOUT_BOOTEASY_BEEP in `/etc/src.conf'.

# Index: boot0.S
# ===================================================================
# --- boot0.S     (.../branches/ncvs/src/sys/boot/i386/boot0)     (revision 47)
# +++ boot0.S     (.../trunk/src/sys/boot/i386/boot0)     (revision 47)
# @@ -201,8 +201,11 @@
#  /*
#   * Start of input loop.  Beep and take note of time
#   */
# -main.10:       movb $ASCII_BEL,%al             # Signal
# +main.10:
# +#ifdef BOOTEASY_BEEP
# +               movb $ASCII_BEL,%al             # Signal
#                 callw putchr                    #  beep!
# +#endif
#                 xorb %ah,%ah                    # BIOS: Get
#                 int $0x1a                       #  system time
#                 movw %dx,%di                    # Ticks when
# Index: Makefile
# ===================================================================
# --- Makefile    (.../branches/ncvs/src/sys/boot/i386/boot0)     (revision 47)
# +++ Makefile    (.../trunk/src/sys/boot/i386/boot0)     (revision 47)
# @@ -54,6 +54,10 @@
#         -DTICKS=${BOOT_BOOT0_TICKS} \
#         -DCOMSPEED=${BOOT_BOOT0_COMCONSOLE_SPEED}
#  
# +.if !defined(WITHOUT_BOOTEASY_BEEP) || (${WITHOUT_BOOTEASY_BEEP} != "no" && ${WITHOUT_BOOTEASY_BEEP} != "NO")
# +CFLAGS+=-DBOOTEASY_BEEP
# +.endif
# +
#  LDFLAGS=-N -e start -Ttext ${BOOT_BOOT0_ORG} -Wl,-S,--oformat,binary
#  
#  .include <bsd.prog.mk>