Re: adding UEFI to NetBSD /boot/ [was Re: no HDMI on rpi4b NetBSD 10.1]

[email protected] (Ramiro Aceves) writes:

>"/boot/kernel.img is what the RPI firmware regularly loads. You still
>need (a similar) /netbsd for some NetBSD tools."


There are programs that traditionally peek into the kernel to read out
some internal data structures. These use /netbsd or /dev/ksyms to read
kernel symbols to find the data.

For most but not all of these programs, there are now sysctl interfaces
to retrieve the data, at least partially.

The /dev/ksyms interface requires to load the kernel symbols into
memory when booting. On very small systems, that might be wasteful
and then /netbsd is the only thing left.

One exception is also kernel debugging with gdb. gdb needs access to
the proper netbsd kernel file (and better the debug information too).