Re: UEFI question

On Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 11:42 AM Alan Somers <asomers@freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Tue, May 31, 2022 at 9:27 AM John Kennedy <warlock@phouka.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, May 31, 2022 at 02:32:21PM +0200, Julien Cigar wrote:
> > > I have a Dell R340 server on which installed a 13.0-RELEASE and then
> > > upgraded to 13.1-RELEASE (through freebsd-update). ZFS is used
> (raidz2).
> > >
> > > The system has the following partitions:
> https://gist.github.com/silenius/2defdd5480c5c1bc9ba2ff8940756466
> > > Some things regarding UEFI are not clear to me:
> > > - as you can see in the partition list, the installer created an EFI
> > > partition on all 4 drives, however it looks like only the first one has
> > > has been populated (an mounted):
> https://gist.github.com/silenius/1220c953f905d868c1615fd0e7122bbf .. why ?
> > > - if I understand well if my da0 disk dies the system becomes
> > >   unbootable (
> https://gist.github.com/silenius/51d202053295270eaaeb2c02316165ee)..
> correct?
> > > - what's the correct way to fix this? should I newfs_msdos on each EFI
> > >   partition and copy /boot/loader.efi as /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI? or
> > >   should I use efibootmgr?
> > >
> > > Thanks for enlightening me :)
> >
> > I use UEFI to multi-boot a lot myself, but not through efibootmgr (vs
> > picking it via UEFI/BIOS on boot manually).  I'm multi-booting windows
> > and FreeBSD, so I'm being (justifiably) paranoid, but not based on
> > being burnt in recent memory.
> >
> > Depending on how your system works (drives are enumerated at startup),
> > in theory any of your disks could be da0.  If you've only got a working
> > EFI partition on one, that is probably hedging your bets a bit but yes,
> > if that drive died, you'd probably be dead.
> >
> > In my dual-disk setups, I'd see an EFI and a freebsd-boot (BIOS)
> partition
> > on both disks, I split my total swap between the two (not mirrored), and
> > did ZFS "raiding" (mirroring-ish, usually) across the freebsd-zfs
> partitions.
> >
> > In my case, using the UEFI/BIOS from the motherboard, I could manually
> > pick a disk to boot from which let me vet UEFI or ZFS bootblock changes
> > for sanity before committing to both.  But yes, I'd upgrade them both to
> > the same thing once I was sure it would work.
>
> I just noticed the same problem.  For mirrored installs, the
> 13.1-RELEASE installer only formats the efi partition on one hard
> disk.  Shouldn't it do both?
>


We go back and forth on this question.... I think we should, but others got
grumpy when I suggested it. Maybe just all the drives in the zpool used for
the BE?

Warner

>