[U-Boot] [PATCH v2 0/4] Add FreeBSD kconfig options

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 12:47 PM, Emmanuel Vadot <manu at bidouilliste.com> wrote:
>
>  Hi Alexander,
>
> On Tue, 17 Jan 2017 20:36:59 +0100
> Alexander Graf <agraf at suse.de> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 17/01/2017 16:50, Emmanuel Vadot wrote:
>> > This series of patches add the needed bits for booting the FreeBSD
>> > loader and kernel.
>> > FreeBSD loader and kernel needs the U-Boot API and dcache/icache flushed
>> > for it to run so add this operation in go/bootelf command and when closing
>> > the API.
>> > Also add some some boot command that locate and run the FreeBSD loader
>> > if found.
>>
>> Is there any particular reason the EFI boot path doesn't work for you?
>>
>> Configuring u-boot differently to be able to boot FreeBSD sounds a bit
>> strange to me.
>>
>>
>> Alex
>
>  EFI works fine for us, that's what we use for arm64 (pine64/rpi3 for
> example) because we want to only use EFI for arm64.
>  For armv6/v7 we have legacy devices etc ... and even if EFI works
> (well honestly I have to fix our smbios code for it to work properly)
> we need to be able to boot without EFI support.
>  With this series of patches is an EFI binary is found this is the one
> that would be loaded, so when the times comes we could make our
> releases with EFI bootloaders for ARM. In the meantimes we still need
> the U-Boot API for our loader.

In addition, we have a long-term support branch (FreeBSD 11.x) that we
need to support with the current setup since we use u-boot to load our
tertiary loader which loads the kernel and related files (hence the
need for the u-boot app API). It's something that's evolved over a
number of years without proper upstreaming in the past. This series of
patches lets us continue to use the tried and true paths, as well as
setting the stage for a migration to EFI for the next major supported
branch of FreeBSD (12.x, not due for a release for about a year or
so). FreeBSD 11 support needs to continue past FreeBSD 12's release.
Finally, as Emmanuel has said, there's still some rough edges to
FreeBSD/arm's EFI support that need to be worked through in parallel
before people will switch to the new way.

Warner Losh
<imp at freebsd.org>