FreeBSD EFI projects

[Ed Maste]

On 17 September 2018 at 14:17, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> Items on my list are:
>
> (1) Retiring boot1.efi entirely before 13.0. It was originally designed to
> be a small, never changing blob we'd toss into an ESP and have all the
> smarts in loader.efi.

I'd go further than this: it was originally designed as a stopgap to
have FreeBSD work in an EFI world when we didn't support the standard
UEFI interfaces and did not have a straightforward way for loader.efi
to find its script/configuration files in a different partition or
filesystem. As far as I recall it was never intended to be a permanent
part of the UEFI boot process.

We'll probably reacquire a small first-stage UEFI boot component: the
UEFI Secure Boot shim loader. But it can load loader.efi from the ESP
and won't be used outside of Secure Boot configurations.

> Moving to a
> 'standard' setup for EFI would be a good first step, as well as having a
> script to do this both for when the ESP is mounted in a non-standard place,
> as well as for when it's not mounted.

I'm not sure how far we have to go in catering to non-standard
configurations. I completely agree we should have a standard EFI
configuration and should support seamless upgrades in that
configuration. For other cases I'd personally just ensure we've fully
documented the components and processes.