10.1-RELEASE UEFI RAID0 ASUS M5A97 R2.0 AMD64 PhenomIIx6

[Arto Pekkanen]

On 22.7.2015 10:57, CeDeROM wrote:
> Hello there :-)
> 
> I have successfully installed and running FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE AMD64
> on ASUS M5A97 R2.0 AMD64 PhenomIIx6 using RAID0 booting with UEFI.
> 
> UEFI and GPT seems replacement for BIOS+MBR in modern PC hardware. You
> can forget about BIOS+MBR in case of UEFI which is tightly related to
> hardware/firmware.
> 
> What is best about FreeBSD that I also could to the setup on older
> ASUS M4A88TD/V EVO/USB3.0 which did NOT support UEFI at all. RAID0 was
> possible to accomplish in 4TB size with no problem. GPT support was
> already there in FreeBSD. I have installed MBR bootloader which then
> switched to GPT support. This setup was not possible for Windows nor
> Linux which were limited to see two 2TB devices, even on RAID. Hale to
> the FreeBSD!! :-)

Gratz :)

Although, I think it would be possible with Linux but you would have to use a DIY distro like Gentoo that doesn't hide all the features behind a cascade of automagic system management UI-dialogs or scripts. That being said, haven't done a customized Linux installation for years now, since FreeBSD + documentation enable me to more easily create a customized FreeBSD installation for spesific tasks.

> However, FreeBSD Boot and Kernel seems to work somehow different on
> UEFI. There is no loader menu, there is no OS prompt. There is problem
> with Xorg-NVidia driver which hangs the boot process at loader (you
> need to use kld_list in rc.conf instead), and then hangs the computer
> somewhere on screen blank. All seems new but familiar :-)

That must be because UEFI depends on kms.ko to get a framebuffer console. In this case it would be the kms/VESA module. So probably there's some kind of race condition between the kms/VESA framebuffer and nVidia kmod.

Have you already checked if there's any PR about this? If not, you could make one. I am sure this could be fixed easily.

> Also installing OS on UEFI is somewhat different. You need to create a
> dedicated EFI partition where boot code is loaded (using dd as
> presented on uefi wiki). BSDInstall creates such partition but its
> only 512k in size, while boot1.efifat is 800k. I have created separate
> partition that is 100M and it works fine as well. I think installed
> could increase the boot partition size, and then dd the boot1.efifat
> over there during install on UEFI platform..?

Hmm, this is something you should definitely make a PR for, if you can. Your description makes it seem like the BSDInstall scripts are a bit behind the actual UEFI boot stack.

> FreeBSD IS THE BEST!! THANK YOU!! :-)
> Tomek
> 

Thank you for describing your use case. This is valuable information :)

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