Re: UEFI installation

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Mark Davies <mark%ecs.vuw.ac.nz@localhost> writes:

> What sort of Dell is it?   We've got lots of them of various ages so
> I'm fairly familiar with the BIOS settings.  Any halfway recent one
> will let you UEFI boot off anything, but the newer they are the more
> restrictive they are in what they will legacy boot from.  Recent ones
> will only allow legacy boot from external USB.

It is an Optiplex 3070 SFF, from 2019, with 32 GB RAM and i7-9700 (9th
gen) and Intel UHD Graphics 630.  It came with a Kingwin SSD with
Windows which I swapped out for a bigger one I have more confidence in,
and can only really handle a single 2.5" drive.

Have there been Dell or HP systems that don't let you turn off Secure
Boot?  That would make them useless ;-(

It turns out that if you just turn off Secure Boot and leave the rest,
it will boot UEFI off USB if present, and if not the internal SATA disk.
There are options for "legacy option ROM" and MBR boot that confused me
into thinking that it would not boot off USB without them, but I think
they meant would not boot MBR from USB.

Once I had booted from USB via UEFI, confirmed vis sysctl
machdep.bootmethod, the installer did the right thing.

> I haven't tried a netbsd-9 install recently, but last week I did a
> uefi install of 10_beta all from the installer and that was straight
> forward and went smoothly.  Previously I'd always broken out and set
> up the disks manually - as per
> https://wiki.netbsd.org/Installation_on_UEFI_systems/

I have a working system from the netbsd-9 installer normal path, with
just "set sizes".  It proposed 128 MiB for EFI, and then I set up / swap
/usr /var (oddly out of order) how I wanted them, and left the rest free
for zfs later.  After a few PEBKAC, totally not the installer's fault,
the builtin re0 works fine.

The computer has VGA, HDMI and DisplayPort, which is an interesting set,
and right now I only have hand-me-down monitors that do VGA and HDMI, so
I used a VGA cable.  It did not detect monitor resolution and ended up
at 1024x768 on both a Dell 1600x1200 and an HP w2207 (1680x1050).  I
realize I may have bad VGA cable and that I can work around with with
xrandr and Modelines in xorg.conf, like in the old days, and that a
post-2007 monitor is in order.

Other than the video resolution, things appear to be working well.
There a few nonconfigured things in demsg but they don't seem likely
important.  I will be moving to NetBSD 10, but am trying to do fewer
things at once.