• Contact: tech-install

Currently NetBSD can be booted via UEFI firmware, but only offers the default boot loader setup so multi-boot environments are hard to create. This also causes cryptic displays in the firmware boot order menu or boot select menu, like "UEFI OS", instead of "NetBSD 10.0".

The UEFI spec offers support to configure load options, which include a path to the bootloader and a description of the operating system, see the UEFI spec. This project is to implement setting up proper load option variables at least on x86 machines booting via UEFI.

Part of the project is to find the best place to set this options up. Some integrations with sysinst might be needed, maybe sysinst is the right place to set this variables. If not, sysinst may simply be changed to use a different sub directory on the ESP for the NetBSD bootloader and the variables setup might happen elsewhere.

Currently the kernel interface to access the SetVariable() and other EFI runtime callbacks exists, but there is no userland tool to operate it.

It is not clear what the EFI path set in the variable should be, and mapping NetBSD disks/partitions to EFI path notation is not trivial.