This will be something for me to fool about with when I have time from other things. Installing it was quite tricky as the installation CD only boots in legacy mode. I had to enable legacy, do the install and then switch back again. The first time, I wasn't fast enough but I still got elilo and then Slackware. I must say I'm puzzled because surely elilo shouldn't have been running in that mode. And Slack behaved very oddly, coming up with glacial slowness and not letting me log in at console 1 (but console 2 worked). Now we're back to normal, booting from refind.

I have made a refind entry for BSD following some instructions which I found online, but so far it doesn't go to completion. And when I mount the BSD partition in Linux, I can see bin and sbin but nothing in usr at all. I wonder how long it will take me to get it all working.

you cannot switch back and forth? that is my guess. But if you can get to slack in efi add this to your /etc/grub.d/40_custom file and adjust it to what disk and partition FreeBSD is on, then update-grub then see if that boots it. I got both slack and freeBSD on EFI but I used the usb stick, v12.1 and BIOS set to UEFI w/o csm when I installed them.

you might also have to adjust to find which boot loader will work out of the three that can be used to boot FreeBSD. FreeBSD used a fat16 boot partition for EFI. Which in how I install this is by creating a "empty" partition and let FreeBSD find it then do what it needs to it, in EFI it created its own efi boot partition, swap and main partition for OS.


ELILO : I am not sure but that same scheme like should be used? I use grub, but from memory in seeing how it sets up win and Slack it as something similar in how it spelled out.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI

So why not just use legacy (CSM) mode?
Don't try to mount BSD slices in another OS, such as Linux, it may see whole slices of a UFS file system, but probably won't be able to interpret the disklabel. As you've not said whether you're using an MBR or GPT, I can only guess.

Anyway, this seems like dejavu...?

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post6041288

It's OpenBSD, not FreeBSD. And I don't use GRUB. I really hate that program. I started off by using elilo for Slackware but that definitely won't boot any kind of BSD so, when I began to play around with the idea of trying BSD, I decided to switch to rEFInd. I had a lot of trouble getting it to boot Linux but that works smoothly now thanks to the way I set up my directory structure. I have a separate directory for each distro, containing a kernel, an icon and a small config file with the command line options. Then I let rEFInd find them automatically.

OpenBSD has a preloader in .efi format which you copy to your ESP and rEFInd is supposed to boot it. It then chainloads to the real bootloader in the first sector of the BSD partition. My problem at the moment is that rEFInd doesn't want to run it. The first time around, I wrote a manual stanza for it (which Rod Smith definitely doesn't recommend!) and it brought up an icon, but when I tried to run the program I got an "Invalid loader file" error. So this time around, I tried to let rEFInd find it by scanning and it wasn't found. I'll try disguising it as a Linux kernel and see if that works. If not, then the file is probably bad and I'll have to download a replacement.

@Cynwulf. If I go back to legacy, I'll have to use it for Slackware and LFS too. You can't keep switching. Everyone warns you against that. And I was getting quite pleased with the way I'd actually got UEFI to work.

Is you disk set up with a MBR or GPT?

It's GPT but of course there is a dummy MBR where I could install GRUB or something if I wanted to.

To install grub in legacy mode on a gpt disk need a 1mb partition flagged as bios-grub. If your able to use lilo or syslinux in legacy mode the bio-grub partition isn't needed. The issue with mixing efi and legacy is not able to chainload efi loader from legacy or legacy mbr from efi bootloader. as long as you don't mind using the bios to switch between the two shouldn't be a problem.

My first partition deliberately has nothing on it and could be converted to BIOS-boot type if I wanted. It's a lot bigger than 1 MB but that shouldn't cause any problems. But then I would have to hold my nose and install GRUB. And if I'm going to do that, I might as well put it on the EFI system partition and run it in UEFI mode. I have to admit that GRUB will boot anything and it can chainload the BSD partition's first sector but it's definitely not my preferred solution.

Lilo won't boot BSD; nor will elilo for that matter. They are Linux Loaders as their names suggest. I don't know about syslinux but the name suggests to me that it's also Linux only. The ideal solution for me would be to get the OpenBSD preloader to work with rEFInd like it's supposed to do.

Constantly switching modes through the UEFI setup would be the worst solution in my view, worse than using GRUB. I like things to "just work".

I'm in! It was a rEFInd problem after all. It seems the program doesn't like to be told to boot the BSD preloader. If you let it find the preloader by itself, that works.

Wow! Everything is strange and new. It's going to take me years to learn all this. Right now my head is spinning and I've decided to take it in small daily sessions. I've been reading the hello message, the afterboot man page and various other man pages. The shell is ksh and it's very similar to bash.

I do have a proper /usr directory after all; it just doesn't show up in Linux because it's a different sub-partition. I haven't got startx to work yet because of a console ownership problem but that's the kind of thing I should be able to fix with the aid of DDG. But the terminology! I can't understand half the words the man pages use.

Now I need to send them the output of dmesg and sysctl hw.sensors and I'm not sure how to. I don't think the instruction to use mail will work because I'm dependent on my ISP's mail servers. They're assuming a basic server setup, not a home user. Maybe I can get the files into Linux somehow and mail them that way.

1 members found this post helpful.

It's not Linux.

It's best not to use startx(1). It's preferable to use xenodm(1):

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq11.html#StartingX

I tried OpenBSD once on bare metal, single boot and it installed fine and booted straight into X, but I asked it to do that during the install. Personally, I found the installer to be terrible and the performance in X to be very slow, bordering on running in frame buffer mode. I did run it on a large 4k monitor though so not sure if it just wasn't designed to perform well on that type of hardware.

As a (former) FreeBSD desktop user, I too found the commands a bit confusing but mainly because I have been using FreeBSD so long, I was used to it. Not OpenBSD's fault. The installer and the bad performance were enough to scare me away though. As a matter of fact, I have stopped using FreeBSD as a desktop because of video driver breakage in 12.1 and just gone back to Debian, my all time favorite.

Good luck on your journey - I do like exploring new operating systems so I understand the curiosity. FreeBSD will remain my favorite BSD though.

I personally find the installer to be very simple and straightforward. OpenBSD is actually easier to install and configure than FreeBSD. The only caveat is that unless you accept the default partitioning schema, you do need to learn the basics of disklabel(8).

Performance is certainly not on a par with Linux. When it comes to the BSD's, DragonFly BSD is probably the best in graphical performance and in terms of SMP. FreeBSD and NetBSD would come second, due to finer grained locking and OpenBSD would come last, due to the the giant lock still being in use.

Performance has never been the priority for OpenBSD, so it's not a given that this will change any time soon.

It also depends on the hardware, the kms/drm drivers, which are ported from Linux, are behind the upstream equivalents, so it's possible you were in fact running in "frame buffer" mode due to lack of hardware support.

If you have fairly modern hardware, it can generally be enough to mask this (providing it's supported), but on older hardware, the big bloated stuff like KDE, firefox, chromium, etc, etc can really start to chug.

I thought the installer was OK actually. It's not very different from the Slackware one. I didn't install the display manager because I'm used to using startx in Linux, but I think I know how to do it. I just have to copy the /etc/rc.conf file to create a local config file and edit that.

Startup seems slow compared with Linux. And the kernel keeps complaining about my usb mouse losing and remaking contact. I'll need to check if Linux does that too. I haven't noticed it on the console but perhaps there's something in messages. In BSD, it makes console 1 almost unusable.

I need to understand how it does networking. In Linux I have only two network interfaces, loopback and the ethernet card, but BSD gives me two more and I have no idea yet what they are. And the device names are weird. I can't see the logic yet.

For the times I have played with Slackware, I found the installer to be very easy. I also find the FreeBSD installer to be easy as well but this is all about personal preference and we all perceive things differently. Good luck on your journey!

Thank you for the performance issue explanation, makes sense. FreeBSD for me on the same hardware is ever so slightly slower than Linux. I have just done the FreeBSD install so many times I can do it in my sleep so it's all about what we are used to I guess.