I just thought I would pass on some observations from manually
installing DragonFlyBSD 4.8 into a UEFI system, having previously done a
standard installation into a VirtualBox VM. While I have long been
acquainted with FreeBSD (back to v2.0.5), the VM installation was my
first direct experience with DFly. This post has also turned out longer
than I expected - sorry about that.
The installation target itself is an Intel NUCI6CAYH with an SSD. I
already had a Linux installation on it with GRUB configured for UEFI
booting.
I knew from the release notes that the installer wasn't going to work
with the existing partition structure for the Linux installation, but
having done some reading didn't have a great deal of trouble (typos
notwithstanding...) getting the installation running.
I chose to install DFly into a single GPT slice (which ended up being
s6), disklabel64'ed with the a/b/d (UFS/swap/HAMMER) layout per the
manual install instructions.
Getting GRUB to boot DFly took some experimenting, but based on some
information posted by the author of rEFInd the following GRUB menu entry
(entered in the 40_custom template) worked for me:
menuentry "DragonFly BSD" {
insmod part_gpt
insmod chain
set root='(hd0,gpt1)'
chainloader /EFI/dragonfly/dragonfly_x64.efi
}
NB: the EFI system partition is in the first GPT slice, hence the "gpt1"
reference.
I may yet install rEFInd - GRUB, while functional, isn't pretty.
In the course of this installation I stumbled over a couple things that
were a little disconcerting though:
- after completing the file copies, I came across a reference to the
installer creating a number of PFSes. PFSes aren't mentioned in the
manual installation instructions that I could find, so my installation
now doesn't have them. I'm not yet clear about whether this is
something worth trying to rectify...
- I thought I might be able to use the standard installer to complete
the post installation steps, but while the command structure implies
this should work attempting to access the "Configure an Installed
System" menu demanded that I select a disk and partition but couldn't
make sense of my GPT layout :-(. None of the functions in that menu
seem like they would need to work at the disk level, so this is probably
a design limitation of the installer. I was able to do the time zone,
passwd and user steps manually.
- the standard installer also appears to clean up the files copied from
the live image (the "installer" login is one thing I have identified so
far) for "production" use, but the manual installation instructions
don't mention anything along these lines that I noticed - is there any
documentation of what the installer actually does to sanitise the
installed files ready for routine operation?
- this machine is coming up with syscons using efifb (the EFI
framebuffer) which has 2 minor annoyances:
= I haven't been able to get the screen saver to activate though the
splash_bmp and logo_saver .klds load fine;
= vt0 is stubbornly remaining in 80x25 mode (and only displaying in the
upper left hand part of the display) while the other vts are in 170x48
mode fully utilising the screen (LCD resolution is 1360x768).
vidcontrol doesn't report any alternative video modes in either case...
I haven't tried to get X running yet...
Hopefully something above may help someone else or inform development
for future releases.
Many thanks to DFly's developers for your work.
Andy.
--
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Andrew I MacIntyre "These thoughts are mine alone..."
E-mail: [email protected] (pref) | Snail: PO Box 370
[email protected] (alt) | Belconnen ACT 2616
Web: http://www.andymac.org/ | Australia
