Re: BIOS back to Text Only by default

On Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 6:37 PM Kevin Bowling <[email protected]>
wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 19, 2024 at 12:36 PM Warner Losh <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Greetings,
> >
> > A while ago, I removed GZIP and BZIP2 support from the boot loader by
> default to get it to fit into the space available for BIOS booting with the
> lua interpreter for PXE booting.
> >
> > This made it into the 13.4 Release. Some downstream distributions
> started needing to build their own loader for this release. Their MFS setup
> relied on either gzip or bzip2 files working and my changes broke that.
> >
> > After talking with people at places like EuroBSDcon, irc and Discord, I
> think I'll take Mark Johnson's idea of moving back to a Text-only boot
> loader for BIOS by default, and putting these two options back into the
> loader.  When we do this, the loader shrinks 20k net (-40k for graphical
> loader, +20k for decompression).
> >
> > My thoughts are that you can boot either with the graphical or text-only
> loader. There's no real functional difference, apart from aesthetics. While
> they are nice to have, when space is tight, we should bias towards keeping
> functional things over keeping things that are just pretty when we need to
> make a choice.
> >
> > EFI booting remains unchanged.
> >
> > I'd like to get this in over the next week or so. I'm soliciting
> comments on this idea. I've created https://reviews.freebsd.org/D47203
> for this change. I've not regenerated the options docs yet, but I'll do
> that as well.
> >
> > Comments?
>
> I feel like that is a fair tradeoff to keep BIOS boot alive with other
> space constraints.
>
> As an anecdote I do have some still useful (to me) Westmere Xeon
> servers that are not UEFI capable and make use of gptzfsboot and would
> like to run them through 15.x.
>

This is for loader. No plans to change gptzfsboot.

Warner


> Warner
>