# How to install OpenBSD on a libreboot system

This section relates to preparing, booting and installing a OpenBSD distribution on your libreboot system, using nothing more than a USB flash drive (and dd). They've only been tested on a Lenovo ThinkPad x200.

- Prepare the USB drive (in OpenBSD)
- Installing OpenBSD without full disk encryption
- Installing OpenBSD with full disk encryption
- Booting
- Configuring Grub
- Troubleshooting

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This section is only for the GRUB payload. For depthcharge (used on CrOS devices in libreboot), instructions have yet to be written in the libreboot documentation.

## Prepare the USB drive (in OpenBSD)

Connect the USB drive. Check dmesg:
$ dmesg | tail
Check to confirm which drive it is, for example, if you think its sd3:
$ disklabel sd3

Check that it wasn't automatically mounted. If it was, unmount it. For example:
$ doas umount /dev/sd3i

dmesg told you what device it is. Overwrite the drive, writing the OpenBSD installer to it with dd. For example:
$ doas dd if=install60.fs of=/dev/rsdXc bs=1M; sync

You should now be able to boot the installer from your USB drive. Continue reading, for information about how to do that.

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## Installing OpenBSD without full disk encryption

Press C in GRUB to access the command line:

grub> kopenbsd (usb0,openbsd1)/6.0/amd64/bsd.rd

It will start booting into the OpenBSD installer. Follow the normal process for installing OpenBSD.

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## Installing OpenBSD with full disk encryption

Not working. You can modify the above procedure (installation w/o encryption) to install OpenBSD using full disk encryption, and it appears to work, except that its not yet clear how to actually boot an OpenBSD+FDE installation using libreboot+Grub2. If you get it working, please let us know.

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## Booting

Press C in GRUB to access the command line:

grub> kopenbsd -r sd0a (ahci0,openbsd1)/bsd

OpenBSD will start booting. Yay!

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## Configuring Grub

If you don't want to drop to the GRUB command line and type in a command to boot OpenBSD every time, you can create a GRUB configuration that's aware of your OpenBSD installation and that will automatically be used by libreboot.

On your OpenBSD root partition, create the /grub directory and add the file libreboot_grub.cfg to it. Inside the libreboot_grub.cfg add these lines:

default=0 timeout=3 menuentry "OpenBSD" {
kopenbsd -r sd0a (ahci0,openbsd1)/bsd
}

The next time you boot, you'll see the old Grub menu for a few seconds, then you'll see the a new menu with only OpenBSD on the list. After 3 seconds OpenBSD will boot, or you can hit enter to boot.

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# Troubleshooting

Most of these issues occur when using libreboot with coreboot's 'text mode' instead of the coreboot framebuffer. This mode is useful for booting payloads like memtest86+ which expect text-mode, but for OpenBSD distributions it can be problematic when they are trying to switch to a framebuffer because it doesn't exist.

In most cases, you should use the vesafb ROM images. Example filename: libreboot_ukdvorak_vesafb.rom.

## won't boot...something about file not found

You device names (i.e. usb0, usb1, sd0, sd1, wd0, ahci0, hd0, etc) and numbers may differ. Use TAB completion.

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Copyright © 2014, 2015 Leah Rowe <info@minifree.org>
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