Booting on Asus T100TA Convertible Tablet

[Tom Jones]

Hello Hackers,

I have an Asus T100TA Convertible tablet thing that I have been unable to get
FreeBSD to boot on. I have installed Ubuntu on it with these[1] instructions.
There was some discussion[2] on getting FreeBSD on this hardware in April, but
the thread sort of died off.  

The issue with the hardware stems from the 32bit UEFI with no compatibility
mode. The BayTrails SOC is 64 bit.

There does not seem to be 32 bit EFI support available in FreeBSD
currently. The UEFI[3] mentions that i386 support will be added a later time. I
also came across this[4] summer of code project that claimed to add 32bit EFI
support.

So EFI seems to be a dead end for now, so I thought I would try to use Grub2 to
boot.

I have a -CURRENT amd64 memstick img, I have tried booting it in the usb port
on the dock and via an USB OTG cable on the main tablet itself. I have also
copied the root partition from the memstick image onto a partition on the
internal mmc.

I then attempt to boot using the grub cli like so:

> insmod ufs2
> insmod bsd
> set root=(hd0,gpt3)
> kfreebsd /boot/kernel/kernel or > kfreebsd /boot/loader
> boot

Attempting to boot loader results in the grub cli hanging. Trying to boot the
kernel directly adds a bar of noise at the top of the screen[5] and the prompt
hangs. The noise at the top appears to scroll slightly.

On the suspicion that this might be a video issue I have tried setting the
following loader variables from grub with the following command:

> set kFreeBSD.hw.vga.textmode=1

set kFreeBSD.hw.vga.textmode=1
hw.vga.textmode=1
kern.vt.fb.default_mode="1024x768"
kern.vty=vt
kern.vty=sc

Setting these options either results in the same as[5] or no noise added at the
top of the screen.

I am at a loss for what else to try, does anyone on the list have suggestions
or pointers?

[1]:	http://liliputing.com/2013/10/booting-ubuntu-asus-transformer-book-t100.html
[2]:	http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2014-April/257777.html
[3]:	https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI
[4]:	https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2012/IntelEFIBoot
[5]:	http://imgur.com/SdhXDxS

-- 
Tom
@adventureloop
adventurist.me

#pragma summon cthulhu
:wq
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