UEFI Development Notes

These are some notes for working on UEFI code, where to find things, etc.

OVMF: https://sourceforge.net/projects/edk2/files/OVMF/

Building a UEFI FTDI Driver

I use an FTDI-based USB to serial cable for serial debugging of Haiku on hardware. This has some support in EDK II, and with the combination of rEFInd http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/, which will load the driver automatically for us, allows early debugging of UEFI for the Haiku Loader. This will also extend to kernel debugging, which will be able to continue to use the USB serial port for debugging using traditional port i/o.

sudo apt-get install acpica-tools nasm uuid-dev
git clone https://github.com:/tianocore/edk2
cd edk2
make -C BaseTools
. edksetup.sh
nano -w Conf/target.txt
build

Options to go into target.txt:

ACTIVE_PLATFORM = OptionRomPkg/OptionRomPkg.dsc
TARGET_ARCH = X64
TOOL_CHAIN_TAG = GCC5

Further information:

Building the Haiku Loader

git clone https://git.haiku-os.org/buildtools
git clone https://git.haiku-os.org/haiku
cd haiku
./configure --build-cross-tools x86_64 ../buildtools --use-gcc-pipe -j4
HAIKU_BOOT_PLATFORM=efi jam -q haiku_loader.efi

HAIKU_BOOT_PLATFORM must always be specified when building haiku_loader.efi. If exported, you will need to use HAIKU_BOOT_PLATFORM=bios_ia32 when building a standard Haiku image.

Testing with QEMU

This assumes you’ve built an anyboot image, e.g. jam -q -j4 @nightly-anyboot. Support for other image types are not yet supported, nor other devices. If you’d like to use a USB disk, see the patch further down.

cd haiku/generated
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256 -vnc :0 -hda fat:objects/haiku/x86_64/release/system/boot/efi -cdrom haiku-nightly-anyboot.iso -bios OVMF.fd -net none -no-reboot -serial stdio

Building a Bootable USB Disk

First, you need to apply the devices.cpp portion of the patch listed in Other Notes. Probably the easiest approach is to boot a VM with QEMU and a raw disk image, and then dd it to your USB disk.

dd if=/dev/zero of=raw-disk-image bs=1M count=1000 # adjust count as necessary; this creates a 1GB image
qemu-system_x86_64 -m 512 -hda haiku-nightly.image -hdb raw-disk-image -hdc fat:objects/haiku/x86_64/release/system/boot/efi

The following steps in Haiku should prepare the disk image for you:

In DriveSetup, create a new GPT partitioning system
Create two partitions, first is EFI System Data, second is BFS
Format EFI with FAT File System, name efi, use defaults
Format BFS, use defaults
Mount all unmounted partitions
Make EFI/BOOT on the EFI system partition (efi) and copy haiku_loader to EFI/BOOT and rename to BOOTX64.efi
Run Installer, and install your running Haiku to the new BFS partition
Shutdown, and your raw disk image should be complete!

Other Notes

The following gist fixes a couple issues with setting up the frame buffer, and lets you boot off a USB disk: https://gist.github.com/jessicah/6c993f46556048b44fd710cdbc81bd50

Note however, that only the devices.cpp part is needed, also at gBootVolume.SetBool(BOOT_VOLUME_BOOTED_FROM_IMAGE, true); this should also be set to false, which is missing in the patch. Probably easiest to just manually apply the changes to devices.cpp yourself.

And serial debugging: https://gist.github.com/jessicah/fa26155c8e3236d9e4ede64f7105d90a (now in master)

jessicah.nz