lol chatgpt can generate fbsd device drivers now

tho i predict screams and rm -f foo.c

meh, i built a full pkgbase and now i have no src & src-sys packages at all, i recall moaning about it and writing custom configurable exclusion of them

which is not active

so hell knows where they went :p

of 16, not 15, so fuck knows

Haha

Get your s**t together, ketas! :D

what

What!?

we need cpet here

He was here the other day, wasn't he?

he was

I got my backup system built and got freebsd installed! I will wait til the weekend to do system configuration

I have to set up NUT, mainly.

after I get that tested and working I'll move onto how to best backup my zfs datasets.

I re-read the article about Lee Holloway and felt so bad about his life and the ruined marriage.

I kind of think that we are inevitably delving into this black hole of social isolation simply because we disregard the relationships around us

and we couldn't possibly have been able to do this without heavily indulging ourselves on computers for social activities

I've witnessed people going into episodes of depression like that simply because of the anxiety of losing friends due to change social circles

changing*

Technology is fine. but With great powers comes with great responsibilities. Increasingly I am seeing this trend of "success by tech" by means of mostly the boring "God-playing" upon a massive group of people.

instances include most telecom operations and social media "applications". when exercised upon a massive group of people, eventually this Holloway-type brain rot happens because people don't realize they've been played by this scheme of rounding up users for them to only talk to each other over a restricted media

just started a disk replacement, resilvers gonna take less than a day. thank you mirrors!

I prefer BSD-based system after my over 5+ years with Linux-based systems.

Or Windows XP, 7.

congrats. I hope we treat you well

15 RC3 and 4 were cancelled, just to keep the original release deadline? won't that make 15R more buggy or?

alsoi hope RhodiumToad_ is ok, haven't seen him in forever

kerneldove_: no worries, they are picking all these bugs and fixing them, one by one, so 15.0-RELEASE will be 101% OK

that's great

kerneldove_: are you contributing, by testing these ALPHAs, BETAs, RCs ?

no but only because i never use .0 releases. i will be for .1+ tho

please consider testing it at least, we should not rely only on LLMs with this regard, but on real users

ok

is there a way to have FreeBSD wait for input before displaying a login prompt?

eg so I can run a getty on the default usb-serial interface, but if I plug in a usb gadget such as a raspberry pi it doesn't wind up in a login loop

zip: probably the appropriate solution is using devd(8) to handle it

I had a suspicion

it doesn't look like standard getty is quite so smart, which makes sense, because it's 2025

it's none of getty's business anyway to deal with devices that have nothing to do with it

today's silly project is configuring the pi's getty to know about ppp and working out how to configure pppd to get as far as ipv6 neighbour discovery

I think historically variants of getty could be configured to wait for user input so that you could connect two systems together and not have them go into a loop

and then local getty would also ignore the line if someone opened the /dev/cu side to connect out

but I get the feeling that's more of an mgetty feature

During a shutdown, my desktop hangs for 10 minutes after "All buffers synced." syslogd has already stopped at this point, so there's nothing in the logs. Could this be because a zfs scrub is going on?

cool, I got PPP working. And the pi still just browns out or loses connectivity so I'm pretty sure this is a matter of it just sucking

Handy to sharpen one's old weapons once in a while: I'd entirely forgotten you could build a VPN out of ssh and ppp

xorg is still vulnerable :/

must be something blocking it :/

zip: I think you can do it just with ssh

Yeah I think there's a flag now

guys/gals, anyone of you experienced any issues with the official forums?

I've noticed a real uptick in FreeBSD appearing in job descriptions.

Working as expected, probably a glitch on my side. Sorry

For years I've had a job search on LinkedIn for 'freebsd ipv6 python' and almost never seen matches for all three keywords, and yet all the sudden it's seeing new matches almost every day.

ZOMG! Dunno, but if you are the person I think you are, FU! Apologies if you're not.

long silence tends to confirm "things". Time and chat will tell :)

mad at me?

any WINE gamers in the channel? If so, have you ever gotten dxvk compiled for wine-devel (WINE 10.15/10.16)? (This would be the Vulkan layer for WINE)

CrtxReavr: maybe AI started creating these job requirements ?

Indirectly, sure.

Or maybe some of these big players are learning that Linux's IP stacks and other features are steaming piles of shit.

mzar: maybe some humans, exposing some buggers.

nope, fully AI-powered HR operations

be it as you wish

I still have my concerrns

s/concerrns/concerns

*shit happenns :)

only if you don't use FreeBSD

_

mzar: sorry?

my humble home lab runs on a mixed patform (linux, FreeBSD), routing and firewalling being the task for FreeBSD. Never had any issues with this setup.

I would mention that I never used pfSense (and derivatives), plain pf did the job quite well

Now, if FreeBSD is going to really adopt the "full" pf, yay!

time will tell

flatdog: 'full' pf (from openbsd?) are you hoping or is there word of that?

rtprio: there were some rumours on the forums about OpenBSDs' pf being integrated. I'm ready to stand corrected

Please, allow me a couple of minutes, I will come back with something more conclusive

not integrated in the sense you're alluding to

replaying patches that make sense and don't break compatibility from the point of divergence

pf source forked some decade ago due to kernel differences but thankfully from a user perspective of configuring it things are mostly still compatible between the systems.

CrtxReavr: uptick in job descriptions? Notice any themes among those hiring?

kp@ and ks@ have significantly improved PF, you can test upcoming 15 flatdog

they are doing by picking one by one features from OpenBSD PF that we are/were missing, like new "pass" syntax, "af-to" (aka NAT64 and NAT46), pflow(4) etc

flatdog: a lot of new features to test, please don't hesitate to give it a try

the guys have done a tremendous work, cannot but rise my hat to them.

sure, we all should, good job

I am hype for "real" PF in 15 :D :D :D

cannot just jump into 15, its complicated. Will do when the time is right.

a lot of testing is going on in the background

things are looking good. Too good.

forgive my bias :)

flatdog: the time is about right

indeed mzar

I am now 100% on 15 in production

it's working just fine

interesting. You did indeed take some risks

yep, someone has to test it

test and production don't play well together, but hey, you got to make your point

I should learn PF

my respect

^mzar

is this a matter of buying The Book Of PF or is it more of a tutorials-are-fine kinda thing

recless, or a pro

without the book of pf, you're lost (or dependent on someone's post)

ive ran 15 since it was branched and only had one minor issue in that whole time

hhe.. no worries, I migrate machines one by one, waiting a few day in between, submitting PRs if required and... it's basically a lot of fun

well, my hat's off. I wouldn't go that way, my boss would kill me. Twice.

Lucky rascal :)

I like this new predictable schedule, respect to @cperciva for planning and and his hard work supervising whole process

your boss is not that bad, at least accepts FreeBSD

my boss is a guru, learnt a lot from him (no ass kissing here)

ha.. I like him even more

small company, yet AS 9100 certified, funny contracts(Romania, Eastern Europe), the harshest market one might imagine. Yet we still produce. You don't want to see my logs, I ensure you.

when the boss is good (as in a pro) everything is good.

can i ask what you make?

blades for turbines.

PraTT&Whithey and Siemens

sorry, Pratt

and the final stage (the static one) for the F-35

sold for export :)

neat

yeah, try keeping the Haas machines within 6 microns tolerance (metrichead here)

+ or - 3

nightmare

zip: Book of PF (2nd or higher ed) is what I'd recommend.

apologies for derailing the chat

flatdog: Welcome the derailment -- it crashed into another fun thoughtline :D

"Reasonable companies actually support FreeBSD as a runtime OS"

"Even in scary regulatory environments"

thank you, Sir :)

you know, FreeBSD shines where nobody see. Security, data safety... things that nobody care about, unless hurt by the lack thereof.

*apologies, english is my third language

flatdog: English is my first, and for the most part, only, so I appreciate the effort regardless.

I don't know how to type the thumbsup emote, but consider it done :)

Oh, forgot to mention, we also machine the VGT for Cummins :)

In case you're riding a bus, 90% of chances you are riding with a part machined by us :)

I'm so f***ing proud!

In text I usually see :thumbsup: as the plain text representation of the emoji.

👍

I'd tend to go with the slightly more effusive \o/

It was the idea, not the actual implementation

sorry for the bragish* wording, but I am really happy with the way FreeBSD deliverrs

Simple tasks, well implamented

s/implamented/implemented

so, adopting the entire OpenBSD pf is going to be a major boost for FreeBSD

my two brezeln

$$$

in time

it is there, but I cannot move to something new, just because its new

Pratt&Whithey, cool, we have also here the factory that was sold to them

still in good shape

I didn't know that they are using FreeBSD

installed a new system yesterday, and of course its FreeBSD

hehe

ill probably do more configuration for it tomorrow

cool, is it your first deployment specialbomb ?

no, just personal stuff unfortunately

I may never be a professional

but now I got two hosts running!

mzar: Pratt&Whitney don't use FreeBSD, we are

Long story short, we have a somewhat freedom to use whatever we want, as long as the +/- 3 micron tolerance is met. We used to use Catia, an expensive piece of software, capable yet way too expensive.

wavefunction, well, the fact that they matched they keywords freebsd, ipv6 and python is very noteworthy, at least to me.

looks like the book of pf 4th edition is nearly out so it may be worth my while waiting for that

for someone who does not need particularly complicated firewalls I sure do know nftables, iptables and mikrotik's weird interface to iptables

Lot with Meta, nVidia, Oracle, Cisco, Et al.

So , we had a look at FreeCad, then LibreCad, both open-source. We-ve settlet on FreeCad, and designed our own post-processor.

Post-processors tent to be an extremely expensive part of designing part of production

Pythonh seemed to fill the bill, we went with it.

interesting story

*think of a post-processor costing you around 20K, in dollars

F*, this, cannot we do our own? And we did.

And our machines are Haas, Okuma, Hermle

It was quite a task, but we're rolling :)

... and running FreeBSD in the networks stack IIRC ?

All those CNC dialects, match them all together, I'm telling you, it was quite a task

good job

Yep, the entire network is a FreeBSD backed one.

are you using ip6 over there ?

No

as of now, no

We are talking about company

I was just asking out of curiosity, no worries

in Romania, one usually gets an IPv6 address, by default

yep

it's a very nice country and developing very quickly

probably the only thing were good at is connectivity

I have FTTH at 25 miles (roughly 32 kilometres) in the wilderness

what about thier cuisine ? dont you like it ?

you have to try it, decide for yourself

TBH I like it

I'm native, easy for me :)

are you from .ro flatdog ?

yes, I am romanian, born, raised and living

(I thought it was obvious)

great !

I was't reading the backlog, I am sorry

no worries, we used to be all humans :)

"Romanian. . . it's like Italian with a Russian accent."

may I ask about your nationality? mzar

do you have any BSD user groups over there ? maybe I can attend a meetup

we were neighbours in the past, I am from .pl

true, about 20 % of our words are slavic, as origin

czesc, mzar :)

about 20 years ago I used to talk quite frequently to vermaden

time passed, he got another girlfriend and here we are.

hhe.. Buna flatdog

"i see the beginning of a beautiful friendship"

hhe.. I am quite often there, I have send you a PM flatdog

s/send/sent

zip: I preordered that book! im excited to get it

PF is very cool.

Really it's kind of shame you can't get tiny VMs with like 512mb of RAM and 2GB of storage, lots of stuff barely needs that

Well.... I've shopped around a bit and I can't find one hosted in the EU without something Annoying about it, like pathetic 2FA on an account attached to my credit card

Or they exist if you want Linux

you mean like VPS services?

Maybe you could use AWS EC2 t3.nano instances using AWS Free Tier.

Ah, maybe not: > you are required to provide a valid payment method to sign up for an AWS account, whether you choose a free plan or a paid plan.

I'm not against it. I ddin't know they had a free tier

I suppose I could have a go at OCI free tier too

oracle free needs a credit card too

. o O ( wonders about getting a larger VM and then using it to host more smaller VMs )

you could do that, depending what your ipv6 conectivity is like, or proxy it

I'm not against putting a credit card in or spending a couple euros a month

main annoyance with OCI is I used to work for them so I gotta read those T&Cs real carefully to make sure I'm allowed to use it

anyway. not against spending money, I'm just side-eyeing the providers who might not do an exemplary job of avoiding making me a free money glitch for some asshole with a crypto miner is all

and I realise I'm being pretty fussy here: looking for something in the £2 range, in Europe, with non-broken 2FA, that I can install BSD on, simply because I feel like everyone's cheapest tier is more computer than I need

zip: Did you look at NetCup? It's more than £2, but not a whole lot more.

possibly people are misreading "on an account attached to my credit card" as "_or_ an account attached to my credit card"

vkarlsen: I have not, I'll take a look

I have an OVH node at their cheapest price level of USD$4.20/month and though they no longer support FreeBSD I installed it using their Debian rescue system in the way that we do these installations and it has been working well for me.

that's not bad

they do seem to have a Freebsd 14.3 option

really I should get on with setting up the pet mini-pc with the services I want

somehow it's easier to sling someone a couple quid for a vps though

quieter, if nothing else

Also has the advantage that if there is a hardware failure that it's not your hardware failure to manage.

To be clear I also have my own bare metal systems too.

I’m currently using a Vultr VPS, but I’m going to be building a FreeBSD-based NAS, that could also host a couple jails and I see that I could maybe use <ovpn.com/en/features/public-ipv4> to have these jails be available under a public static IP.

So I’d have a jail connect to that over WireGuard.

I'm contemplating doing a quick reformat and putting 15-BETA5 on it as I figure that'll be the easier upgrade pathway

right now I have a debian VPS running pi-hole, which feels a bit silly

Hello, all. Is there a chance FreeBSD will run on a PC with 256 Mb of RAM, or shall I seek an older and/or lighter OS?

If FreeBSD does not run on it then no other OS will run on it either. Why is there any concern at all? Is something wrong with this hardare?

ant-x: It will likely run, but what do you want it to do?

rwp, the amount of RAM.

Oh! You said MB and I thought you said 256 GB. My bad.

ant-x: I had 512 on a vm running unbound, but I had to increase it to 768 due to large zone files

vkarlsen, some very lightweight web hosting, SSH, very lightweight X (e.g. twm without a desktop environment).

No ZFS, of course.

I was trying to figure out how something couldn't run on a 256 GB RAM system and it befuddled my mind with that concept.

I've tried dialling my VM's RAM to 256mb and FreeBSD 14-3 ran

^ :-)

I will later probably get more RAM, because the PC itself is circa 2005, and should have more.

ant-x: ctrlv.link/shots/2025/11/14/IkJV.png

zip, Good to know.

I am running FreeBSD on a 512MB system for a bastion host and it seems acceptable. I am running it on a 4GB storage and that's my main problem with it. 4GB of storage is the minimum without doing pruning of the system.

ant-x: This one does use zfs, btw

vkarlsen, I heard horror warnings not to use ZFS with less than 4 GB of RAM.

My 512MB one is also running zfs. Probably pkgbase would allow me to trim it down. If I had to partition it again I would give it 6GB instead of 4GB of disk.

Thanks.

People who have horror stories about zfs and ram have de-duplication turned on and there isn't enough memory to do that for anything.

ant-x: I run a web and mail server on zfs with 1 gig of ram, no issues

Most of my on-laptop VMs have only 2GB, and ZFS is content with that.

vkarlsen, running your own mail server -- you are an iron man.

2GB RAM, I mean.

V_PauAmma_V, the official installer itself advices against ZFS for < 4GB RAM.

A lot of us here have always run our own email servers. I have always run my own email server.

This week I got a copy of "postfix: the definitive guide" so we'll see how that works out

rwp, getting any trouble from the big providers not accepting your mail?

ant-x, it does? I must have overlooked it - or maybe it only does on 14.x and 15.0.

My 512MB ssh bastion host is using 25MB of swap. It's not doing anything else though. If running a web server I wouldn't run less than 1GB of RAM. File system buffer cache, ahem I mean ARC, is critically important to performance.

ant-x: Worry less, live more :D

I have no problems with mail delivery to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, others. But I have somewhat of a special case because I am also hosting friends mailing lists and those conspiracy theorists are active reading and responding to emails from my server. They call that engagement. It is like a vaccine inoculating my server. Victory unintentional.

I will hardly server more than a few requests a day, unless LLM craslwers find it. I am totally new to BSD administration, and got this PC out of the trash can to try.

ant-x: that was more or less my first machine with freebsd too

Since you got your bare metal at a bargain cost of free then you have nothing to lose to try running any experiment upon it. Give it a go! Then you will know.

Do you know of a way to serve a website without a static IP? Or do recommend that I get one? My provider offers a static IP for an extra price...

mine was a p90 running freebsd 3.4

Reminds me of my first laptop. NetBSD was the only thing I could run on it, because everything else I tried used so much memory that I couldn't load the driver for the PCMCIA NIC

ant-x: some dynamic ips stay rather static, like the same ip for months or years

rwp, that's it. It is sitting on my desk all bare, without even a case (but I have ordered an ultra-slim microATX case).

If it is truly just a home experiment you can run a dynamic dns IP address acceptably well. As long as your ISP does not block you for violating their terms and conditions.

if yours is not (and mine now refreshes every couple of weeks) i just update the dns for the zone when it changes

I call those bare cased systems en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Godiva systems. They work great on the home workbench.

Internet is made for hosting things: an network of nodes.

rtprio, you mean you update your domain's settings to point to the new IP?

ant-x: Looks like ovpn.com offers static IPv4 for 4 euros/month

I can't vouch for them, though. I just saw this myself

For 4 euro/month can probably spend a few more pence and get a full VPS system along with it.

vkarlsen, thanks.

ant-x: yes

Can I use L2TP/ipsec -- offered for free here <web1.0hosting.net> ? Will it work with a FreeBSD server?

Does FreeBSD have its native server software, or does it use httpd/nginx typically?

it does not have it's own, but among nginx there are practically dozens of web servers to choose from, depending on your needs

among nginx? Isn't there only one nginx?

nginx and a fork when a RU-based developer was barred from working on it, IIRC.

yes, and dozens of others

My FreeBSD VPS using VPS and hosting 2 jails, one with Caddy, and another one with cgit, is using 329MiB currently.

using UFS*

There was a falling out in the nginx development and now a main developer has forked off freenginx which is the version I use.

apache, tomcat, lightty minihtpd microhttpd etc etc

rtprio, Those are not actually nginx though!

If you want to get technical, there are nginx-full and nginx-lite in addition to nginx :)

V_PauAmma_V, As I understand it the nginx fork had nothing to do with it being a Russian developer being Russian. It had to do with the commercial corporation of nginx itself being more corporate than community.

i said dozens other ones to choose from

"announcing freenginx.org" mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-d…IC6VYO2PB7N4HRP2FUQIBIBCGP4WAU.html

Sounds good. Now -- to install FreeBSD.

I am using this port: freshports.org/www/freenginx

rwp, maybe? I vaguely remember that was (a side-effect of) sanctions against Russia. But I've been known to be wrong.

Is not nginx more difficult than httpd, in that it delegate everything to external async components?

*reads* Ah, yes. That email makes it clearer what caused it and what was unrelated.

I think in this case it is just F5 being a corporation and acting like it. To be clear though I support the sanctions against Russia for starting a war invading Ukraine.

hmmm reading the man pages, pkg-info has -a but thats lists all the installed ports, I want explicitly installed ports, no dependencies included

I dont see anything in the man page, do I need to filter it somehow?

I generally try to avoid politics in IRC channels but I didn't want to appear as an apologizer for them here either.

polarian, As I understand it you need pkg-query and the query language with %this and %that filters. I don't know off the top of my head further.

rwp: ah... I such at pkg-query

:P

possible feature request to pkg-info though

%V in `man pkg-query`

rtprio: that returns an int tho

ant-x, Regarding what you say is a negative that nginx delegates backend processing to fcgiwrap and other backends others such as myself see as a positive that those are separate. It's one of the things that makes nginx so fast at being a frontend to the hostile Internet. Much faster than other all-compiled-into-one servers.

oh wait im stupid

I need to use -e

rtprio: %V is always 0 for some reason :/

rwp, the negatives are relative: I found it hard to host a PHP page that way -- but I am a nooob. Another negative in nginix is that it has nothing like httpd's local .htaccess files that can give non-privileged users of a pubnix lots of control. With nginx, you have to be root, AFAIK.

I've been wondering if step 1 of setting up a webserver is configuring blocklistd to nuke the subnet of anything that tries to talk to it other than my home network or letsencrypt, then getting the letsencryt certificate, and then letting the firewall tables fill themselves up for a while

step 2 being to add some honeypot endpoints to robots.txt and nuke anything that touches them, or /admin, or a couple other popular ones

robots.txt is a genrlemen't agreeement. It can be enforced by the server.

I see: the scavengers read your robots.txt, and try paths listed in it.

zip, At one time firewalls were open and we tried to block bad actors. Eventually came around to blocking all by default and only allowing known good actors. I think we are heading that way with the web. I think soon most sites will be blocking all by default and only allowing known good clients through after they register. Sigh.

I think that in our moder age, some LLM poison like Iocaine should be in place, too.

Just yesterday, this website blocked me on the ground that I was using a "suspiciosly old browser". He whitelisted my User-Agents (including the old FireFox on Windows XP).

ant-x: what's Iocaine?

ant-x, Use fcgiwrap+spawncgi+multiwatch for a full robust configuration. The Apache .htaccess feature is a good way to slow down the server and so I always avoided using it. With Apache you should be root as well.

Remember that by default apache and nginx and the others all drop priviledges and run as a non-root non-priviledged user account.

honestly for the next year or two you can probably get a pretty low false positive rate by blocking anything over http 1.1

rtprio: the correct one is %a and then check if it =0

sorry for my stupidity

thx for the help

Additionally on FreeBSD if one has security concerns then one should run web servers inside of a jail configuration. And compartmentalize the backend services in jails too. It's straightforward.

Hello everyone. Anyone knows a working way of PXE-booting FreeBSD installer with Grub?

I've also been wondering how effective it'd be against a scanner to basically have ssh set up to port-knock on... port 22. A scan is gonna drive by and think your socket is closed, whereas I know that the second time is the charm

If one is already running a VM VPS as a compartment anyway then that's already a container though so doing so on a dedicated system like that is an optional additional layer.

tavvva, I have not tried that combination. I have configured PXE to boot other installers. Seems reasonable to have it with FreeBSD too. Immediately after you mention it I want to work on setting it up for my own use.

I tried pxeboot chainload and it crashes

tavvva, Is there a reason you want to boot FreeBSD with GRUB? It's a valid combination but not a native combination.

Coincidentally a couple of weeks ago I tried to get PXE booting of a FreeBSD NFS diskless system. It starts the boot but then fails due to being out of space on something along the way. I tabled it for a while until I get back to debugging it. This was on 14.3-RELEASE for me.

rwp: yeah ... The reason is an already functioning broad ecosystem on top of Grub

tavvva: why grub?

oh

i used ipxe.org

tavvva, Apparently no so well functioning since it was failing for you. Just saying! :-)

rtprio: believe it or not, it's the best solution :] it supports architecture based menu selection

hodapp, <iocaine.madhouse-project.org> .

rtprio: it reliably supports fallback to the 1st HDD boot

rwp, I am a member on a pubnix that uses httpd, and .htaccess let's me do a lot without root access.

When last I set up PXE booting from scratch some years ago the best practice was using the syslinux boot loader system. And I found syslinux to be a very good capable system for PXE booting.

ant-x: hmmmm interesting...

rwp: well ...maybe it is not caused by grub :]

ant-x, If the only way to operate is with hands tied behind your back but it works for you then don't let me disparage the method. Just keep doing it and be happy.

rwp: the crash happens in pxeboot and I'd love to overcome it with direct kernel+modules load, if possible

rwp: openbsd and netbsd works

Well, I am going to become king on this ancient computer (which does not seem to boot from USB...)

tavvva, It's sad that FreeBSD is behind NetBSD and OpenBSD on this. But those are also very good operating systems too.

rwp: moreover ... openbsd and netbsd offer ramdisk version of the kernel with builtin installer as one file

rwp: something that you can directly load with knetbsd or kopenbsd command and it just works!

Friendly competition among the family is good for pushing technology forward.

more so someone coding it out of spite

I am not an expert in this area but I recall a FreeBSD something which did load the installer fully into ram...

when chainloading the fbsd version of pxeboot I get BTX halted and a registry dump

My neurons are vaguely remembering discussion about bhyve booting grub and *BSD and thinking there is information in that topic area of bhyve for doing this that would be useful.

ant-x: yeah :) computers not booting from USB are pita .... do you know you can PXE-boot plop boot manager v5 to boot from the USB afterwards? you can boot plop boot v5 also from Floppy or CDROM

tavvva, Ah... mfsbsd.vx.sk is a fully ram based FreeBSD installer.

rwp: mmmm ... the address looks "official" :D

It's the author's main site. You can also look here: people.freebsd.org/~mm/mfsbsd/mfsbsd.pdf

mfsBSD has been around for a long time and is fairly well known.

tavvva, yes: I know plop can sometimes boot what the BIOS won't.

rwp: Martin Matuska seems to be Czech too ... I could at least discuss that with him in my native language :)

There you go! Win-Win! :-)

however ... after a bit of reading it seems it supports a bit different scenario .... it looks like it loads a pre-installed system, not the installer itself and it would have to be hacked more

I have used it to launch bsdinstall on a system before. Probably pretty easy to have it do that automatically.

Grub supports extra options for freebsd .... 1.] modules 2.] hints

any chance using them for starting the installer?

or even better ... any chance you could start releasing a PXE-bootable ramdisk kernel like OpenBSD and NetBSD ?

OK, bootin from a USB-HDD was hidden with other HDDs in BIOS. I have booted from FreeBSD-14.3-RELEASE-i386-mini-memstick.img, but the setup told me that some of the necessaryt files were not found on the boot media, and is asking for an internet connection. Can I skip that? Or is that mimi-memstick version intended for network setup?

I assume that "you" is referring to the general large group here. You might address that to the freebsd-hackers mailing list though. You and I have been chatting and I don't make those releases so no chance for me to do it.

rwp: oh ok ... sorry .... for some reason I thought you're one of the devs :]

My beard is grey and I have been around a long time but I am not one of the committers.

OK, I have installed FreeBSD, and booted into a 640x480 VGA mode, althougth my display is 1600x1200. A vesa.ko driver is loaded, but no specific Radeon drivers are in sight. There should exist radeon and radeonkms driers, but I can't locate them with pkg. Where can they be?

ant-x: docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/x11/#x-configuration-amd

The WIKI <wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix> tells me to install the drm-kmod port. I can see it in freshports: <freshports.org/graphics/drm-kmod>, but ``pkg install drm-kmod'' will not find it.

rtj, it is not about X at all.

(I am configuring the TTY).

^ The Handbook also mentions ``pkg install drm-kmod''. This command fails for me with "No packages available".

And it is looking in FreeBSD-kmods, as exptected of 14.3 .

I am running 14.3-RELEASE with the radeonkms graphics driver from ports. "pkg install drm-kmod" and "sysrc kld_list+=radeonkms" installs it and configures it okay for me. But it is in ports and that is sometimes out of sync with the base kernel and sometimes failing to build due to other reasons.

i don't think you need any kmods for tty modes

But ``pkg search drm | grep kmod'' finds: gpu-firmware-kmod -- firmware modules for the drm-kmod drivers. Is that it?

What version of FreeBSD have you installed?

rwp, 14.3 here. Just downloaded and installed. I did not not ``pkg install'' could install ports in addition to packages.

rtprio, the vt manpage says I need a KMS driver to set the high framebuffer resolutions for my tty's.

Correct.

Also did you boot Legacy BIOS or UEFI?

Legacy.

Me too booting Legacy BIOS. BIOS has a built in character generator. UEFI does not and requires a graphical boot right from the start. BIOS boots in the default resolution character mode and then loading the driver allows it to change to higher resolutions.

What I don't like, is that ``pkg install drm-kmod'' fails to find that package.

rwp, yes -- as explained in the man pages.

I have a graphical 640x480 mode (not text mode), but I cannot use my display's native resolution. Many Linuxes automatically get it from EDID.

^ Shall we compare our repository configurations?

I don't know why that (pkg install drm-kmod) is not working for you. It worked for me when I did it previously. Sometimes the pkg repository build fails and packages are not in the repository.

I fear I made a non-standard insrall, via mini-memstick.img .

There has also been a recent change to build kernel modules from ports with newer versions of the kernel. There is an example of that in the man page. That does not work for me though so I can't comment upon it.

``pkg update'' says all is up-to-date.

Really though "pkg install drm-kmod" is in the handbook and it should be working. That's the documented process. I don't know why it would not be working.

Yes, it is sad. I don't even have the path mentioned in the Handbook: /usr/local/etc/pkg .

If you don't have that path then you have not run pkg yet. pkg creates that path the first time it is run.

No, I have already bootstrapped pkg, and it now fully functional!