Re: Ventoy support

On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 11:22 AM Ed Maste <emaste@freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 24 Oct 2023 at 21:24, Kyle Evans <kevans@freebsd.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 10/24/23 20:03, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> > >
> > > What "modules" are being provied by Ventoy, I do not know
> > > of any FreeBSD modules being provided by Ventoy, it is an
> > > EFI shim that loads the FreeBSD loader, and the loader
> > > does all the work.
> > >
> > > Again, perhaps I do not see this as I am only using ventoy
> > > in EFI mode.
> >
> > There's an accompanying geom module as well, source available[0] for
> > every version they support (except 14.x, apparently, despite having a
> > built blob in the geom_ventoy_ko dir).  It's a little annoying to try
> > and understand the problems they're running into from version to
> > version, IMO, since they just publish the entire module again for each
> > version rather than maintaining some __FreeBSD_version shims or
> something.
>
> In particular, the kernel does not use EFI services for the root
> filesystem.
>

I've looked to pass the root filesystem into FreeBSD via a UEFI file path,
which FreeBSD has most, but not quite all, of the infrastructure to do.
I've been slowly adding pieces to round this out. For simple filesystems
on simple devices, it can be made to work. ZFS can be made to work too,
but requires fairly different code (also, for ZFS, we can cheat and pass
in a name that the boot loader and the OS share).

The Ventoy stuff is interesting as well...  Ed has some good ideas here
and we've also done some work to have a unified .mem and .iso image
as well... Though, honestly, the .iso format is getting rather long-of-tooth
and we might be better off leaving it behind like others have done.

Warner