Trying to multiboot with FreeBSD

[Bryan C. Everly]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 12:07 PM, Bryan C. Everly
<bryan at bceassociates.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm working on a blog post about how I was able to set up a Thinkpad
> x230 to UEFI multiboot Arch Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD.
> I have installed DragonFlyBSD (I believe) successfully and copied
> /boot/boot1.efi to my EFI partition and created an entry pointing to
> it for rEFInd (just like I did for the others).  Unfortunately the
> behavior I'm seeing is that the first stage bootloader for
> DragonFlyBSD is seeing the UFS partition for FreeBSD and is trying to
> boot that.
>
> Any ideas what I can do to get around this issue?
>
> Thanks,
> Bryan

All,

I did the painful but logical thing and wiped the drive to start over
and put DragonFlyBSD in front of FreeBSD in terms of partition
sequence and was able to boot.  However, on this x230 in UEFI mode,
I'm getting a similar problem to what I saw in FreeBSD:

1.  Boot
2.  See the DragonFlyBSD menu
3.  Boots fine until the EFI framebuffer loads
4.  Now everything is a bunch of diagonally striped chatter in the
first line of the framebuffer
5.  It actually is booting and running, but I can't see anything
because the display is off

To fix this same problem in FreeBSD on this same laptop, I loaded the
i915 kernel module and used the vt(4) "Graphics Mode Console" and all
was good.

When I horsed around in DragonFlyBSD to do this, I added the following
to my /boot/loader.conf file:

kern.kms_console=1
i915_load="YES"

Unfortunately, even though I see i915 and DRM loading, I still get the
EFI Framebuffer and the same problem.

Any ideas?  I'd really like to get into DragonFlyBSD and figured what
could be safer than an x230 but I think the hangup is that I'm UEFI
booting and I'm guessing most of the other x230 users of DragonFlyBSD
are not.

I'd appreciate any help guys as I want to jump in and see what I can
do to help this project out!