Re: BIOS back to Text Only by default

On Sat, Oct 19, 2024 at 12:36 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> 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.

> Warner