efi-loader ignores dtb files?

[Kyle Evans]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 2:26 PM Manuel Stühn <freebsdnewbie at freenet.de> wrote:
>
> While trying to get FreeBSD 12.0 up and running on a NanoPI NEO2
> (aarch64 Allwinner H5) I'm stumbling over issues with
> loader/loader.conf.  FreeBSD starts fine, but it uses the
> devicetree-blob provided by uboot/EFI. I've tried to load the FreeBSD
> one by adding these lines to loader.conf:
>
> sun50i-h5-nanopi-neo2.dtb_load="YES"
> sun50i-h5-nanopi-neo2.dtb_type="dtb"
>
> and put the dtb file into /boot/dtb/sun50i-h5-nanopi-neo2.dtb, but this
> did not work at all.  It got completely ignored by loader. The rest of
> the file was read and applied correctly (kernel-modules i'd added for
> testing purposes were loaded correctly).
>
> I tried to load it by hand like this:
>
> load -t dtb sun50i-h5-nanopi-neo2.dtb
>
> which worked, the dtb file was loaded and used. After consulting
> loader.conf(5) i found this way to load modules:
>
> dtbfile_load="YES"
> dtbfile_type="dtb"
> dtbfile_name="sun50i-h5-nanopi-neo2.dtb"
>
> and this finally triggered loader(8) to actually load the dtb.
> Unfortunatley the problem occurred again when i tried to add overlays.
> Those are, again, not recognized at all:
>
> /boot/loader.conf:
> fdt_overlays="sun50i-nanopi-neo2-codec.dtbo,sun50i-nanopi-neo2-sid.dtbo,sun50i-nanopi-neo2-ths.dtbo"
>
> Any ideas?

Yes- for your first problem, loader doesn't recognize a period as a
valid module name, so those directives would not have gotten
recognized as modules to load.

I'm not sure off-hand why fdt_overlays were not recognized. I would
drop to loader prompt and double check that it actually ended up in
the environment, but I don't see any reason off-hand that it wouldn't.
It might be a good idea to drop to loader prompt and trigger overlay
application. No output at all?

> BTW, is there a way to keep the u-boot logs printed before the
> FreeBSD-boot-menu gets drawn? The console gets cleared and erases some
> (valuable?) information. I was always to slow to stop the boot right
> after the last line of u-boot and the first of EFI.

Any reason you need to keep the loader menu? Disabling it
(beastie_disable="YES") and lack of password prompts will stop the
screen clearing in recent-ish versions of the lua scripts from head.

Thanks,

Kyle Evans