FreeBSD and Coreboot

[Edward Napierala]

On Tue, 28 May 2019 at 12:17, Eric McCorkle <eric at metricspace.net> wrote:

[..]

> > Now that the loader supports a ram disk, we are almost to something
> > useful... but yea, almost and crummy often go hand in hand.
>
> This is looking out ahead of my current roadmap, but if you were to do a
> kernel as the coreboot payload, there'd need to be some kind of trick to
> support ZFS-only systems.
>
> ZFS requires modules, which are typically pre-loaded (and linked) by
> loader (or GRUB).  Coreboot has no disk or filesystem or even device
> access facilities, however.  It's just "pull an image out of flash, do
> the bare essential hardware initialization to get to a C runtime
> environment, then jump into the image".

A ramdisk could help with that - boot with UFS-formatted ramdisk image
as rootfs, have init(8) execute a script that loads zfs.ko and whatever
other kernel module that's neccessary, and reroot into ZFS.