stored in EEPROM or NVRAM. It's inspired by the NetBSD eeprom(8) and
the SunOS/Solaris eeprom(1M) utilities. Currently, this eeprom(8)
only supports systems equipped with Open Firmware and is only tested
on Sun machines but should work on any platform using Open Firmware.
A bit more specific, eeprom(8) can be used on these systems to do the
same under FreeBSD as can be done using the printenv and setenv
commandos in the boot monitor. One thing that only hardly can be done
using the boot monitor but easily with eeprom(8) is to write a logo
to the "oem-logo" property. eeprom(8) may also be useful to recover
the boot monitor password (in the default configuration only as root,
of course), i.e. when the boot monitor allows you to boot but you
can't alter the configuration because the password is unknown. The
man page may also be a useful reference of the various configuration
variables.
The idea of eeprom(8) is that handlers can be written to add support
for any firmware that stores such configuration in EEPROM or NVRAM;
sort of e.g. eeprom(1M) on Solaris/x86 is used to turn PAE-support
on and off (stored in a file then, not hardware). In FreeBSD, a
candidate for this would be a handler for the EFI boot environment
for FreeBSD/ia64.
eeprom(8) uses some code from NetBSD (eeprom.c and the base for
eeprom.8), the handler for the Open Firmware /options node
(ofw_options.[c,h]) was written using ofw_util.[c,h] from ofwdump(8).
Reviewed by: ru (slightly earlier version of the man page)
a08266267e