@lopta @clf

I can likewise confirm, albeit that I'm using a wired network, that #NetBSD aarch64 also works on a #RaspberryPi 4, bootstrapped from #TianoCore.

https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Platform/RaspberryPi/RPi4

I'm possibly being unfair to CP/M there. Its user interface was on occasion better than u-boot's.

But in the early 1980s IBM came along with this program named SETUP for its PC. It was menu driven and full-screen.

Although originally loadable from floppy disc, by the 1990s it was generally in ROM, and had colours and used function keys and had list boxes and had little help messages that were even sometimes helpful.

By the 1990s, IBM had invented its Boot Manager, originally with OS/2 and PC-DOS but later cloned by others, that sat in a type 0A partition and gave a menu of bootable things, complete with human-readable partition descriptions that one could edit with FDISK and LVM.

And now it's 2025, and for machines that post-date the 1990s by a decade, I have a choice between something that sits in boot virus areas and names partitions "(hd0,msdos2)" and something that gives one flashbacks to PIP and ERA.

Or Microsoft Windows.

#EFI #UEFI #bootstrap #DUET #TianoCore

@ptribble

And yet the downloads page explicitly states "All #OmniOS releases are for the x86-64 architecture only.".

* https://omnios.org/download.html

They could do with letting the world know that this experiment exists, instead of hiding it in a tree of its own on a downloads site that isn't linked-to.

Then people like me casting about for some #RaspberryPi diversity could find it. (-:

As it is, the operating system's own site doesn't mention it, and the search engines turn up dead end stuff like this as top results:

* https://solarisdesktop.blogspot.com/2013/02/illumos-on-raspberrypi.html

I don't expect Wikipedia to be accurate when it comes to this stuff, but the operating system's own WWW site could at least mention that there's a port even if it adds a lot of caveats about unsupported, best-effort, tier 2, and so forth.

That looks like an EFI bootloader. I wonder whether I could use it from #TianoCore.

…

Gah!

I'm going to have to resist. I'm *supposed* to be resurrecting my Debian amd64 build machine.

#Illumos

@jamesoff

I don't know whether you can get #TianoCore onto a 2. I have it on a #RaspberryPi 4.

It just drops straight in as an armstub in the Pi boot volume. Unlike OpenBSD, the NetBSD install image (for Pi 4, anyway) has enough free space for it.

@jmcwhatever is looking into the #NetBSD boot loader spinners, should you spot that.

@jamesoff

If you can get #TianoCore on that, it gives the kernel a pretend real-time clock. It's very noddy, doesn't get updated by the kernel at any point, and only ticks when you're in the SETUP utility, which means that it loses time like nobody's business.

But you get a clock. (-:

@heisec

#Coreboot mit #Tianocore let's go!

You're welcome. I cottoned on when there was a very brief flicker of a character at one point, and went looking.

#TianoCore doing that self-recursion for backspace and #NetBSD calling OutputString twice makes enough of a window that the character not being erased yet, can synchronize with the display refresh on rare occasion.

So I expect that some sort of putchar_twiddle() that calls OutputString then SetCursorPosition would likely also cut down twiddling overhead.

#FreeBSD #DragonFlyBSD