[RFC] Deprecation and removal of the drm2 driver

[Rodney W. Grimes]

> On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 11:48:38AM +0200, Philip Homburg wrote:
> > >Also as the Moore's law curve flattens expect the life of these
> > >older, but not so old, machines to live quiet some time.  I
> > >believe we are talking sandy bridge and earlier?  If that is
> > >corret Sandy bridge is still a very viable system.
> > 
> > I noticed this lack of love for older systems recently. 
> > 
> > I wanted to use an older Dell server to test the 11.2 BETAs and RCs.
> > 
> > Turns out, you can't install FreeBSD using a USB stick image because the
> > BIOS only support MBR. No idea why MBR support was dropped for the USB images.
> > 
> > In the end I had to find a CD burner, and after a couple of tries managed to
> > install from CD.
> > 
> > After that, my ansible playbooks started failing because /boot/loader.conf 
> > is absent if you boot from zfs in combination with MBR.
> > 
> > Pity. This older server hardware is great for trying out new releases, play 
> > with zfs, etc.
> 
> The disc1.iso (as well as bootonly.iso and dvd1.iso) images are now
> built as hybrid images, supporting both MBR and GPT, as well as being
> written to a flash drive (like memstick.img) as well as a CD.

To clarify a minor point here, are the amd64 disc1.iso images or
both the amd64 and i386 disk1.iso images being built as "hybrid"?

As this is what I see on my system:
root at x230a:/home/ISO/x # file FreeBSD-11.2-BETA2-*
FreeBSD-11.2-BETA2-amd64-disc1.iso: DOS/MBR boot sector; partition 1 : ID=0xee, start-CHS (0x0,0,2), end-CHS (0x3ff,255,63), startsector 1, 1472695 sectors
FreeBSD-11.2-BETA2-i386-disc1.iso:  ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data '11_2_BETA2_I386_CD' (bootable)

> MBR support was initially removed from the memstick installer, as it is
> not compatible with some UEFI implementations.  (Or, at least that is my
> understanding, based on my limited intimate knowledge of UEFI.)
> 
> Glen
> 

-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org