oh there we go, the qemu script for booting the original liveCD host was pointed at a wrong image, not the staging image, because that wasn't the one we'd been using lately

we wish we could manage qemu from the command line, typing these by hand every time, instead of saving our invocations in scripts. like we'd still have the scripts, but the act of pasting the relevant pieces of them would help us be aware of what we're doing and avoid mistakes like this

no, no, it was the right one, something else is wrong. hmmm.

... oh oops, was that the wrong partition ><

heh. so the VM's disk filled up overnight, halting our build of pkgsrc. this time, though, because we have the separate config to boot the live image with the staging image attached, resizing is no problem, so we did that.

right, good, so this is where that work we went into figuring out ssh access to the netbsd anonymous CVS repos the other day pays off

okay, we've been assured by libreboot's author that it's expected that it doesn't work under qemu right now. we're preparing to flash, which means getting the actual tools together... time to figure out netbsd pkgsrc, heh

think we're gonna go with an off the shelf libreboot build at first and customize it later at leisure

we're gonna actually write some bytes to disk today towards setting up the thinkpad. that's our goal. enough with the reading already, heh

okay, this is a Very Bad Idea and we're not going to do it, but

notionally if we used coreboot with the grub payload, thus putting grub in the firmware rather than on-disk

we could further point grub at a LUKS-encrypted boot partition, holding a netbsd kernel and ramdisk image which would then further decrypt the root partition, which would of course be in the netbsd formats

the thing about social problems surrounding computers is, even when you want to focus on the social part, you still end up having to write code ><

yeah wow it's a completely different set of results every time that search runs, and only a very small portion of them have the search term in them. wow.

okay, it decided to work after a few tries. weird that it's noticeably nondeterministic, that didn't used to be the case. really very weird. not aligned with our mental model of how web search works, and we know quite a bit about that.

uggggggghh a duckduckgo search site:man.netbsd.org ramdisk returns an entire page of results none of which have the word "ramdisk" anywhere on them

same goes for doing it with double quotes

but like for example, it supports GPT (the partition-table format, the actual good modern one that's standardized as part of UEFI), but we had to dig through over a dozen places to be sure of that, almost everything just speaks as if the disklabel format is the only thing

we should really be taking notes on which topics we feel the NetBSD docs need to address more proactively. we're largely new to the platform right now and, as we always say, newcomers are in the best position to identify docs needs

unfortunately we're kind of goal-focused right now because we have a lot of problems to solve if we're gonna get something working for ourselves, and we're not really up for that ><

this is the model that's currently fanciest / most-modern but still well-supported by libreboot.

the boot process does require blobs.

it takes DDR4 RAM, which is frustrating as we have DDR5 we'd like to reuse, but oh well. desire is the origin of suffering. DDR5 isn't well-supported by free bootload stuff anyway, we're told.

we have acquired a lenovo thinkpad T480S (we wanted the non-S but this was all we could find in stock locally)

now to see if we can put together a nixified libreboot

to be clear, they did refund us and offer a coupon code

neither of which were things we asked for. they refunded us before we'd said anything at all, and expressed a total inability to look into the shipping problem

so it doesn't come off so much as "sorry" as "please go away forever"

so, sigh, uh

if you're in Canada, maybe don't order physical books from No Starch press. they, uh, .... well, their customer service is ghosting us, but our best guess from the limited information available to us is that their computer prints Canadian addresses in an unreadable format, which parcel services can't handle.

it would be helpful to know if anyone else in Canada has received orders from them correctly, and whether those were Kickstarter orders.

it's a little hard to tell because it looks like the only cross-references to compatibility are downstream, not part of the coreboot project as such, and may be a bit out of date. hm