On 2016-04-07, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a Thinkpad X200 laptop with libreboot 20150518 (latest stable > release). > > Libreboot is basically coreboot + grub2 without bios services and with > no text console.
and without CPU microcode updates that may fix important, maybe security- related, bugs. > But if I try to load /bsd (is it a kernel at all? seems to be gzip > archive with some elf) or /5.9/amd64/bsd.rd kernels, they do not boot > up. After several seconds the machine reboots without any messages on > the screen at all and grub menu reappears. It's just a gzipped kernel, the normal boot loader supports these directly. You could try gunzipping it and see if you get further but the lack of text console probably won't help you. > Is it possible at all to use USB serial port as console? No. > Do I have any feasible options to get serial console to this laptop? Unlikely. > I think that if I unpack bsd.rd and edit /etc/ttys it might help, but I > did not find any information about bsd.rd structure, such as supposed > offset of embedded image, its format and so on. > > elfrdsetroot(8) is mentioned in man rd, but http://man.openbsd.org does > not have a manpage for it. It doesn't mention it with a manpage section number, just as "the elfrdsetroot tool" - it can be built like this: cd /usr/src/distrib/common && \ cc -o rdsetroot elf32.c elf64.c elfrdsetroot.c rdsetroot -x /path/to/bsd.rd /tmp/ramdisk.image vnconfig vnd0 /tmp/ramdisk.image mount /dev/vnd0a /mnt ... umount /mnt vnconfig -u vnd0 rdsetroot /path/to/bsd.rd /tmp/ramdisk.image /etc/ttys only helps when multi-user, it doesn't affect kernel console or single-user mode. But in the "..." stage you can create /mnt/auto_install.conf to run the installer (or auto_upgrade.conf for the updater), see autoinstall(8), which may get you somewhere.
