Mastodawn

About a year ago, I had gotten my hands on an Elitebook 840 G8. It would not boot #OpenBSD. After some deep research, I found out that it was due to a broken UEFI architecture - thanks to the always wonderful HP.

I eventually found a fix - recompiling the OpenBSD kernel with a bit higher offset. While I had it scripted (loosely based on earlier work by @rqm ), it still was a pain for someone whom upgrades the snapshots daily.

So, I eventually gave up and moved to a different machine. Slapped #SecureBlue on the Elitebook for the occassional shits and giggles.

Recently though there was a firmware update for the UEFI. With a long list of fixes, I thought I'd try again.

And it worked I am now typing this Toot on the Elitebook, running OpenBSD-current with the vanilla kernel

Show thread

h3artbl33d

4d ago

So, whatever HP did in the UEFI update "unfucked" the relevant bits and freed the offset that OpenBSD uses.

And now that I am sharing this - I recall that I have experienced the same before - on a HP Elitedesk (IIRC: DM 800 G5).

I hope that this might be useful information for others. If you have some HP hardware that won't boot OpenBSD, make sure you have the latest firmware.

I don't know if this affects the Elite series only or also the Pro series.

#OpenBSD #HP #Elitebook #Elitedesk

Show thread

Ólafur Jens Sigurðsson

@h3artbl33d i have a hp spectre 360 which has booted openbsd since I installed it about 1 or 2 years ago. Haven't updated firmware since I got this machine, used, about 7 or 8 years ago.

Yeah, it does seem to affect only machines after the 8th or 9th generation Intel CPUs.