Feedback on proposed loader changes

[John Baldwin]

On Thursday, February 01, 2018 10:59:14 AM Warner Losh wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 9:58 AM, Devin Teske <devin at shxd.cx> wrote:
> > And as the principal author of the Forth menu since 9.0:
> >
> > 3. Please give me a way to run my code (at the very least until I can
> > bring the Lua up to snuff; and if I can’t just let me run Forth
> > in-perpetuity).
> >
> > Interrupting boot1 so I can drive the system in the pre-boot Execution env
> > is very important to me.
> 
> 
> For !EFI, this is relatively easy. boot1 you can type /boot/loader_forth
> instead of the default /boot/loader if the symlink changes and you want to
> go back.
> 
> For EFI the answer is more complicated. boot1.efi is going away, so
> loader.efi will move to the ESP in \efi\freebsd\loader.efi, but it's easy
> enough to have multiple versions there (loader_lua.efi and
> loader_forth.efi) and select via EFI Shell or EFI Env variables which one
> you want should you need to fall back.
> 
> Does that answer your concerns?

I think there is an even easier route for doing scripted loader development
now: Use bhyve with bhyveload.  You get to run the loader as a plain userland
program (so you can use normal debuggers on it while it is running) while
being able to test all the menu features.  You can even make it use the
builtin host: filesystem without requiring a disk image so you can modify the
lua files directly on the host that are getting pulled in for a fast
edit-debug cycle.

-- 
John Baldwin