Re: Interested in the project "Add UEFI boot options"

On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 04:58:11PM +0530, Romeo Sarkar wrote:

> https://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/Add_UEFI_boot_options/
[..]
> I request you provide me some more information on how and where to start
> this project.

The wiki page has a link to the UEFI spec - so first step would be you
understand how a "load option" would look like (from the UEFI point of view).

Then you need to create a local test environment, e.g. by installing NetBSD
on a real machine booting from UEFI and on the Efi System Partition move
the netbsd bootloader from the default location

	EFI/boot/bootx64.efi

to (say)

	EFI/boot/test/NetBSD/bootx64.efi

This will make the machine unbootable unless you create a load option
pointing at the new path (or use the uefi shell to boot, or find
a way in your UEFI implementation to load a specific file).

Then you would have to find out how the load otpion should look like on
your machine (and that is already not trivial).

And you would have to create a userland tool (or modify the FreeBSD one)
to allow setting this from within NetBSD.

Final step would be to create a way to automatically do the matching
of the device name for the "not trivial" step above via code from within
the userland tool or the installer.

Martin