This guide was written for NetBSD at a time where Libreboot was still fully free.
NetBSD is not a fully free softrware operating system / distribution and so the GNU Boot project can’t force its contributors to test GNU Boot with NetBSD.
Because of that this page is only meant for people already Using NetBSD. See the BSD index page for more details about how GNU Boot deals with this issue and the way forward to a better support for BSD systems in GNU Boot.
According to the Libreboot project at the time, GRUB supported booting NetBSD kernels directly. However, they told that you were better off simply using the SeaBIOS payload; They also told that BSD worked well with BIOS or UEFI setups.
They also warned that while GRUB was acceptable for booting unencrypted BSD installations, encrypted BSD installations probably required the use of SeaBIOS/Tianocore.
In addition, GNU boot may also remove support for booting encrypted BSD systems in the GRUB images it provides at some point, in order to make GRUB smaller to fit computer with a very small boot flash size (512 KiB) like the Intel D945GCLF, and unify the documentation, but also because it can’t currently test that due to the lack of fully free BSD systems that are easily installable.
So if you already use NetBSD with encrypted partitions, and that want to continue using it on a computer running GNU Boot, you should use GNU Boot images with SeaBIOS.
This page on the NetBSD website shows how to create a NetBSD bootable USB drive from within NetBSD itself. You should use the dd method documented there.
This page on the FreeBSD website shows how to create a bootable USB drive for installing FreeBSD. Use the dd on that page. You can also use the same instructions with a NetBSD ISO image.
If you downloaded your ISO on a OpenBSD or NetBSD system, here is how to create the bootable NetBSD USB drive:
Connect the USB drive. Check dmesg:
dmesg | tail
Check to confirm which drive it is, for example, if you think its sd3:
disklabel sd3
Check that it wasn’t automatically mounted. If it was, unmount it. For example:
doas umount /dev/sd3i
dmesg told you what device it is. Overwrite the drive, writing the NetBSD installer to it with dd. For example:
doas netbsd.iso of=/dev/rsdXc bs=1M; sync
You should now be able to boot the installer from your USB drive. Continue reading, for information about how to do that.
If you downloaded your ISO on a GNU+Linux system, here is how to create the bootable NetBSD USB drive:
Connect the USB drive. Check dmesg:
dmesg
Check lsblk to confirm which drive it is:
lsblk
Check that it wasn’t automatically mounted. If it was, unmount it. For example:
sudo umount /dev/sdX* umount /dev/sdX*
dmesg told you what device it is. Overwrite the drive, writing your distro ISO to it with dd. For example:
sudo dd if=install60.fs of=/dev/sdX bs=8M; sync dd if=netbsd.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=8M; sync
You should now be able to boot the installer from your USB drive. Continue reading, for information about how to do that.
You might have to use an external USB keyboard during the installation. Press C to access the GRUB terminal.
grub> knetbsd -r sd0a (usb0,netbsd1)/netbsd grub> boot
It will start booting into the NetBSD installer. Follow the normal process for installing NetBSD.
TODO
Press C in GRUB to access the command line:
grub> knetbsd -r wd0a (ahci0,netbsd1)/netbsd grub> boot
NetBSD will start booting.
If you don’t want to drop to the GRUB command line and type in a command to boot NetBSD every time, you can create a GRUB configuration that’s aware of your NetBSD installation and that will automatically be used by GNU Boot.
On your NetBSD root partition, create the /grub directory and add the file gnuboot_grub.cfg to it. Inside the gnuboot_grub.cfg add these lines:
default=0 timeout=3
menuentry “NetBSD” { knetbsd -r wd0a (ahci0,netbsd1)/netbsd }
The next time you boot, you’ll see the old Grub menu for a few seconds, then you’ll see the a new menu with only NetBSD on the list. After 3 seconds NetBSD will boot, or you can hit enter to boot.
According to the Libreboot project at a time when it was still fully free, most of the issues occur when using coreboot’s ‘text mode’ instead of the coreboot framebuffer. This mode is useful for booting payloads like memtest86+ which expect text-mode, but for NetBSD, accodring to Libreboot at the time, it can be problematic when they are trying to switch to a framebuffer because it doesn’t exist.
Your device names (i.e. usb0, usb1, sd0, sd1, wd0, ahci0, hd0, etc) and numbers may differ. Use TAB completion.
Markdown file for this page: https://gnu.org/software/gnuboot/web/docs/bsd/netbsd.md