git: 0b7472b3d8d2 - main - Mount the EFI system partition (ESP) on newly-installed systems.

[Kevin Bowling]

This got me interested because I did recall something like Warner
mentioned.  It seems like some of the folks that used to be at OzLabs
did it as a PoC
https://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2015/10/20/tianocore-uefi-ported-to-openpower/.
One of the exciting things about OpenPower was that everything above
the gates was open in a way only RISC-V seems a chance of repeating
any time soon.  There are no practical limits to the firmware and
runtime service; if you haven't seen this you both might enjoy it
https://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2016/10/30/windows-nt4-for-powerpc-guest-on-opal-on-power8-in-qemu/.

Practically speaking, with Petitboot (which FreeBSD on PowerNV uses)
there isn't much point to go to something like UEFI.  It's literally
Unix vs DOS-like.  The primary targets are Raptor POWER9 hardware and
LoPAPR/LoPAR VMs (kvm, PowerVM) and I don't see any near term
indication of the ISA expanding to new platforms that would concern
FreeBSD.

Regards,
Kevin

On Sat, Feb 27, 2021 at 8:18 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Feb 27, 2021, 8:01 PM Brandon Bergren <bdragon at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Feb 27, 2021, at 8:39 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
> > > > 32-bit Arm can boot via EFI. Just mips* and powerpc*.
> > >
> > > There was some rumblings of little endian powerpc64 efi, but I don't
> > > think it's ready...
> >
> > I've never heard of such things. PAPR/LoPAPR/LoPAR (pseries) is specified
> > as an OpenFirmware platform, and I don't see that changing in the future
> > given the way it's baked into the spec. And PowerNV is a
> > minimal-runtime-services platform where the runtime abstraction (OPAL)
> > calls don't include any sort of way to access disk devices.
> >
> > Do you mean alternative firmware for PowerNV? I've heard people talking on
> > and off about coreboot, but I don't see that becoming mainstream over the
> > petitboot skiroot payload.
> >
> > I don't see the pseries virtualization requirements changing away from
> > OpenFirmware in the future either, given the OpenFirmware requirement has
> > been a constant all the way back to CHRP.
> >
>
>
> There was a working group that was defining powerpc bindings that were
> being worked on. When I went back to find them again I couldn't, so maybe
> they came to naught...
>
> Warner
>
> >
> > > Yea, we have long since switched our preferred boot on arm to EFI...
> > > though we don't have installer images for 32bit arm, which is this
> > > runs... so it's needed for correctness, but not a practical
> > > difference...
> > >
> > > Warner
> >
> > --
> >   Brandon Bergren
> >   bdragon at FreeBSD.org
> >
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