This section relates to preparing, booting and installing a OpenBSD distribution on your libreboot system, using nothing more than a USB flash drive (and dd). They've only been tested on a Lenovo ThinkPad x200.
This section is only for the GRUB payload. For depthcharge (used on CrOS devices in libreboot), instructions have yet to be written in the libreboot documentation.
Connect the USB drive. Check dmesg:
$ dmesg | tail
Check to confirm which drive it is, for example, if you think its sd3:
$ disklabel sd3
Check that it wasn't automatically mounted. If it was, unmount it. For example:
$ doas umount /dev/sd3i
dmesg told you what device it is. Overwrite the drive, writing the OpenBSD installer to it with dd. For example:
$ doas dd if=install60.fs of=/dev/rsdXc bs=1M; sync
You should now be able to boot the installer from your USB drive. Continue reading, for information about how to do that.
Press C in GRUB to access the command line:
grub> kopenbsd (usb0,openbsd1)/6.0/amd64/bsd.rd
It will start booting into the OpenBSD installer. Follow the normal process for installing OpenBSD.
Not working. You can modify the above procedure (installation w/o encryption) to install OpenBSD using full disk encryption, and it appears to work, except that its not yet clear how to actually boot an OpenBSD+FDE installation using libreboot+Grub2. If you get it working, please let us know.
Press C in GRUB to access the command line:
grub> kopenbsd -r sd0a (ahci0,openbsd1)/bsd
OpenBSD will start booting. Yay!
If you don't want to drop to the GRUB command line and type in a command to boot OpenBSD every time, you can create a GRUB configuration that's aware of your OpenBSD installation and that will automatically be used by libreboot.
On your OpenBSD root partition, create the /grub directory and add the file libreboot_grub.cfg to it. Inside the libreboot_grub.cfg add these lines:
default=0
timeout=3
menuentry "OpenBSD" {
kopenbsd -r sd0a (ahci0,openbsd1)/bsd
}
The next time you boot, you'll see the old Grub menu for a few seconds, then you'll see the a new menu with only OpenBSD on the list. After 3 seconds OpenBSD will boot, or you can hit enter to boot.
Most of these issues occur when using libreboot with coreboot's 'text mode' instead of the coreboot framebuffer. This mode is useful for booting payloads like memtest86+ which expect text-mode, but for OpenBSD distributions it can be problematic when they are trying to switch to a framebuffer because it doesn't exist.
In most cases, you should use the vesafb ROM images. Example filename: libreboot_ukdvorak_vesafb.rom.
You device names (i.e. usb0, usb1, sd0, sd1, wd0, ahci0, hd0, etc) and numbers may differ. Use TAB completion.
Copyright © 2014, 2015 Leah Rowe <info@minifree.org>
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