Customizing NetBSD boot banners.

I recently discovered that it’s surprisingly easy to customize the NetBSD boot loader banner, simply by adding some directives in the boot.cfg configuration file...

https://www.cambus.net/customizing-netbsd-boot-banners/

#system #boot

NetBSD ASCII flag for the bootloader.

Attempting to draw the NetBSD flag in ASCII and use it when booting in both NetBSD/i386 and NetBSD/amd64 in BIOS mode was thus too tempting, so here we go...

https://www.cambus.net/netbsd-ascii-flag-for-the-bootloader/

#boot #system

A NetBSD/amd64 guest can now boot in 40ms.

I've been working the past 3 months into catching up with Colin Percival's work on FreeBSD with the Firecracker hypervisor.

The result is that NetBSD/amd64 can now boot in PVH mode, i.e. directly into the kernel using qemu's -kernel flag or the PVH-enabled version of AWS's Firecracker.
I then added support for MMIO kernel command line parameters, so NetBSD now supports memory mapped backed devices like ld(4) or vioif(4). Last but not least, I've been tracking boot time until reaching 40ms from the assembly entry point to handling over to userland...

https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/197vfmq/a_netbsdamd64_guest_can_now_boot_in_40ms_details/

#virtualization #boot