Bug 256343

Summary: Proposal for a generic boot/loader.conf, mainly for hints (in addition to defaults/loader.conf)
Product: Base System Reporter: Harald Schmalzbauer <bugzilla.freebsd>
Component: confAssignee: freebsd-bugs (Nobody) <bugs>
Status: New ---    
Severity: Affects Only Me CC: grahamperrin, markj, parv.0zero9+freebsd
Priority: ---    
Version: 13.0-STABLE   
Hardware: Any   
OS: Any   
Attachments:
Description Flags
Template/draft for a generic boot/loader.conf none

Description Harald Schmalzbauer 2021-06-01 16:42:24 UTC
Created attachment 225465 [details]
Template/draft for a generic boot/loader.conf

Hello,

over the years, console has undergone massive changes in FreeBSD.
When we haven't had EFI, and sc(4) was the only video console available, options were much simpler than today.
With the advent of vt(4), zfsloader, loader.efi - just to name a view - I lost overview.
And there's serial console of course too.  Still one of the most important things to be aware about, imho.
Over the years, comments/hints in my various loader.conf versions grew and differed significantly enough, that I started to confuse things myself.

So I merged all hints into some text for my personal, generic boot/loader.conf (template).

I'd like to share that and would like to know what you think about including a generic boot/loader.conf by default - more or less like the one attached here.
Of course in addition to boot/defaults/loader.conf.

Please note that the lines below ##platform/machine specifics# are not meant to be part of a possibly generic loader.conf- I left them intentionally for the curious ones and in case there's something others frequently copy of that real world example.

And please note, that I propose to set "vbe_max_resolution" by default - I see no reason why we don't want the VESA switch to enable higher resolutions than 640x480; the statement about the default switch to 800x600, if no EDID data could be read, never worked for any of my (i386 resp. non-UEFI) setups.

-harry
Comment 1 Mark Johnston freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2021-06-07 13:35:34 UTC
Hi, I suspect this should be proposed in a mailing list post to -hackers or -current.  You're not going to get much feedback here.