[SeaBIOS] Chromebook doesn't boot BSD

[Ronny]

On Mon, 15 Feb 2016 12:27:09 -0500
Kevin O'Connor <kevin at koconnor.net> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 05:16:06PM +0100, Ronny Schneider wrote:
> > > Am 15.02.2016 um 15:40 schrieb edward wandasiewicz <0.w3ntd at gmail.com>:
> > > On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 11:02 PM, Kevin O'Connor <kevin at koconnor.net> wrote:
> > >> - it looks more like the various BSD kernels don't like the USB
> > >> controller and/or USB drive on your machine.  Have you tried
> > >> using a different type of USB drive for the install media?  It's
> > >> also possible there's something in the ACPI tables that coreboot
> > >> provides that is confusing the BSDs.
> > 
> > I tried several usb-sticks and sd-cards. Every time the same result:
> > it doesn’t work.  If i boot NetBSD without ACPI-support the screen
> > turns black and stays this way until the machine is shut down.
> > 
> > >> Your logs seem to indicate you also have an eMMC and an SD card.
> > >> Have you tried placing the install media on an SD card instead of
> > >> USB?
> > 
> > That’s right. The main storage device of this Chromebook is an
> > eMMC. Booting from SD card is working if it is a linux. BSD won’t
> > start from. The same results as using an usb stick.
> > 
> > >> Another thing you could do is launch the install media with the
> > >> same verson of SeaBIOS on QEMU emulating an XHCI drive and SD
> > >> drive - just to see if it's possible to reproduce outside of your
> > >> particular machine.  See below.
> > 
> > Using QEMU it is working flawlessly, wether the SeaBIOS version is
> > 1.8, 1.9 or 1.9.1 (which i compiled myself).  So it really seems to
> > be a problem with the BSDs.
> 
> So, if both XHCI and SD work on QEMU, then I don't have much of a
> guess as to what the underlying problem is.  It's odd that two
> independent hardware systems (xhci and sd) would both experience the
> same failure to find the root drive.
> 
> As a long shot, you could compile seabios without CONFIG_SDCARD and
> then deploy it on your chromebook - just to see if booting from usb
> then works.  Similarly, you could try without CONFIG_USB_XHCI to see
> if sd somehow then works.  I don't have much hope either would help
> though.
> 
> The other option would be to follow up with the various BSD developers
> to see if you can extract more debug information to narrow down the
> cause of the failure.
> 
> -Kevin

I opened a bug at the DragonFlyBSD list for bugs and will see if someone can help with this problem: https://bugs.dragonflybsd.org/issues/2890

Maybe i have to get in touch with the other BSD-devs.

Thank you all so far! :-)

Best greetings,
-- Ronny Schneider