Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli
ea44fdce87
The page name aren't directly meaningful. In contrib.md for instance I would expect to find how to contribute. In git.md instead I would expect to find how to download GNU Boot but not how to contribute. Since the authors page isn't meaningful anymore for GNU Boot as it has different priorities than Libreboot at the time where it was fully free, and also because GNU Boot also wants to put forward smaller contributions, especially contributions that aren't recorded in git. As the GNU Boot project doesn't have the same community or dynamics than the Libreboot project had, the gaps it has are different. So we also try to put forward contributions that fills these gaps. However since this page is very important historically, so we need to keep it not to forget about it. So to fix that we added GNU Boot's point of view and moved it in the history section. Signed-off-by: Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org> neox: updated link in pages/template.include 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: