Re: Boot Loader: OFW network booting support

From: Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2022 01:30:11 UTC
On Mon, Nov 14, 2022 at 09:34:25AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> I'd like to drop support for OFW network booting.
> 
> These days, the only OpenFirmware machines are really old Mac G4 and G5
> machines. Nothing else can use it (it used to be shared with sparc64
> machines).

Which are still in use.  Particularly, Mac mini G4 and Power Mac G5 make
good backup/storage boxes and just nice piece of hardware to have around.

> So, rather than do a lot of work I can barely test (I might have an old G4
> mac in my dad's old thing), I'm thinking about dropping the support,
> especially since I don't think it's been used by anybody in a long time.

Netbooting had always been preferred over to flashing optical media due
to how easy it is to setup.  This is the first option recommended by grehan@
in his guide* and that's how I installed FreeBSD on all my G4/G5 machines.

My votes goes to keep it.

./danfe

*) https://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/install.html