Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli
967c4b5b05
Since the GNU Boot project doesn't want to force any of its contributors to test with nonfree distributions or operating systems, we can't review the accuracy of the BSD pages, and there are no GNU Boot users who already use BSD systems that contacted the GNU Boot project. So the solution here is instead to document the current project decisions, to point to freedom reviews of the BSD operating systems by the GNU project, and to convert the articles to refer to what Libreboot stated about BSD systems, while taking the point of view of GNU Boot. Since Libreboot already very strongly discouraged the use of GRUB to boot encrypted BSD systems, users using BSD systems probably have followed this advice or were aware of it, so this enables us to remove support for BSD encryption inside GRUB without the need to try to directly contact users. Still, as I plan to try to do that (to reduce GRUB's size for computers with 512KiB flash size), it's still a good idea good idea to document it inside the page as well to explain why, according to GNU Boot (and not LibreBoot) it is a good idea not to rely on GRUB images for booting encrypted BSD systems. Signed-off-by: Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org> Acked-by: Adrien Bourmault <neox@gnu.org>
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It is highly recommended that you use the SeaBIOS payload if you want to boot a BSD operating system or distribution. GNU Boot Images which start with the SeaBIOS payload are available in the latest GNU Boot release, for all the supported computers.
Most GNU Boot images with GNU GRUB also have SeaBIOS available in
the boot menu, though it might not be the case for computers with a
very small boot flash size (512 KiB) like the Intel D945GCLF. GNU
GRUB, when compiled as a coreboot payload, runs on bare metal and it
can boot any other coreboot payload if you use the chainloader
command.
The way to use SeaBIOS is fairly self-explanatory. SeaBIOS functions the way you would expect on a typical computer. GNU Boot currently lacks any sort of documentation for SeaBIOS, but you can refer to their website: https://seabios.org/SeaBIOS
SeaBIOS was especially recommended by the Libreboot project when it was fully free for people doing an encrypted installation.
The Libreboot project also listed the fact that SeaBIOS was "basically more reliable" at least with BSD systems by giving the example of ZFS that was less reliable in GRUB and contrasting that with the fact that if a FreeBSD system booted in SeaBIOS, it would work just fine because the users would be using the bootloader provided by FreeBSD.
In addition, GNU boot may also remove support for booting encrypted BSD systems in the GRUB images it provides at some point, in order to make GRUB smaller to fit computer with a very small boot flash size (512 KiB) like the Intel D945GCLF, and unify the documentation, but also because it can't currently test that due to the lack of fully free BSD systems that are easily installable.
GNU GRUB payload
GRUB can directly boot many BSD kernels, but according to the Libreboot at the time where it was still fully free, support for this was quite unreliable compared to its support for booting Linux kernels. However, you could use GRUB.
When you used GNU GRUB directly, in this way, the various BSD bootloaders were bypassed entirely.
The GNU Boot project has separate pages for each BSD system: