[PATCH] grub + FreeBSD's loader(8) + ZFS root

[Navdeep Parhar]

Hello grub-devel,

Right now it's not possible to boot using FreeBSD's loader(8) from a ZFS
root filesystem.  Grub doesn't indicate to the loader that there is a
ZFS root involved and consequently the loader fails to find the kernel.
The attached patch fixes this.  It does not affect those that boot the
kernel directly.  This is only for users that want to boot using
FreeBSD's loader.

Why would you want to?  IMHO it is much simpler to boot indirectly using
the loader because in that case grub does not have to deal with
device.hints, kernel modules, kFreeBSD.xxx style variables,
/boot/zfs/zpool.cache, etc.  As a FreeBSD user, I'm used to putting this
information in the "normal" config files (/boot/loader.conf, device.hints,
etc.) and not in a grub.cfg file. Grub only needs to know where the loader
is, nothing else:

menuentry "FreeBSD 8" {
       search -s -l fbsd8
       kfreebsd -D /@/boot/zfsloader
}
(fbsd8 is the name of the ZFS root pool)

Let me know if you have any questions.  Once again, if you load the
kernel directly and want to load modules and set kFreeBSD.foo.bar=...
yourself, all that will continue to work.

Regards,
Navdeep

grub+zfsloader.diff
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