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

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 9:48 AM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com>
wrote:

> 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/
> .
>

Ah yes, it was OzLabs' tianocore port that I recalled.


> 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.
>

Yes. I agree as well. I was just hoping to say just that: EFI is barely
theoretically possible, but in reality we'll likely never use it....

The net effect is that we don't want to install efi on powerpc on freebsd.

Warner


> 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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