Re: Interest in Add UEFI boot options project and some design questions

Mouse <[email protected]> Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:49:01 -0400 (EDT)
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.devel.installation
Message-ID <[email protected]>
>> a) Extending bootx64.efi (from sys/arch/i386/stand/efiboot) to
>> provide a GRUB-like menu that scans disks/partitions and lists
>> available NetBSD kernels.
> As Martin said, please, no.

Agreed - if you want Linux you know where to find it - but if you lose
the "GRUB-like menu" part, that could be useful: a boot-prompt command
that scans available disks looking for things that might plausibly be
NetBSD kernels.  The important differences are (1) command-line versus
menu and (2) it happens only on specific user action or configuration.

But you'd probably want to be able to subset it out.  Two reasons come
to mind: (1) some ports probably don't have any way to enumerate
available disks from the booter and (2) for those that do the resulting
code could make the booter too large to fit (though most of those use a
two-step booter in which the second step code is far less constrained,
so this may not be an issue in practice).

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