Re: Review D58990: freebsd-update: automatically update EFI and BIOS bootloaders on install

On Thu, Aug 20, 2026 at 12:37 AM Stefan Esser <se@freebsd.org> wrote:

> Am 19.08.26 um 18:30 schrieb Ronald Pagani Jr (ronald.pagani.jr):
> > I've submitted a patch to automatically update the EFI bootloader on the
> ESP
> > during freebsd-update install:
> >
> > https://reviews.freebsd.org/D58990 <https://reviews.freebsd.org/D58990>
> >
> > The problem: freebsd-update updates /boot/loader.efi on the root
> filesystem,
> > but the UEFI firmware boots from loader.efi on the EFI System Partition
> — a
> > separate FAT32 partition that freebsd-update never touches. After a
> major
> > version upgrade the ESP loader can be left several versions stale. Since
> 14.1
> > removed the lua_path==nil compatibility shim from core.lua, this
> mismatch
> > produces a hard boot failure. If the user also ran zpool upgrade, the
> system is
> > completely unbootable without external media.
> >
> > The patch hooks efi_bootloader_update.sh into install_run() in freebsd-
> > update.sh. It auto-detects the ESP via gpart, fingerprints /EFI/BOOT/
> > BOOTx64.efi before touching it (multi-OS safe), creates
> /EFI/FreeBSD/loader.efi
> > if absent, updates NVRAM, and handles BIOS GPT bootcode as well. Opt-out
> via
> > UpdateBootloader=no in freebsd-update.conf.
> >
> > Tested on FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE-p11 amd64 (UEFI, ZFS, NVMe). 197 unit/
> > integration/error tests available at:
> >
> > https://github.com/RZA-SF/freebsd-patch-for-bug279829 <
> https://github.com/RZA-
> > SF/freebsd-patch-for-bug279829>
>
> I'm using a much simpler version that just covers my setup, and would
> like to replace it by a more general version.
>
> This fails for me in lines 231 to 236 since device names are expected,
> but zpool status returns a diskid based path:
>
> $ zpool status zroot
>    pool: zroot
>   state: ONLINE
> config:
>
>         NAME                          STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
>         zroot                         ONLINE       0     0     0
>           diskid/DISK-8ESKF03YZ0EAp2  ONLINE       0     0     0
>
> errors: No known data errors
>
> $ sh efi_bootloader_update.sh --dry-run
> freebsd-update: [bootloader] INFO:  Boot method detected: UEFI
> freebsd-update: [bootloader] WARN:  No boot disks found
> freebsd-update: [bootloader] WARN:  Boot disk discovery failed
> freebsd-update: [bootloader] WARN:  If using hardware RAID or an exotic
> topology, update the bootloader manually
>
> My version uses "gpart show -p" to list boot partitions and to fetch
> the corresponding device names:
>
> $ gpart show -p | grep -w efi
>          2048      522240  diskid/DISK-8ESKF03YZ0EAp1  efi  (255M)
>          2048      522240  diskid/DISK-81S0A0K7FJDHp1  efi  (255M)
>          2048      522240  diskid/DISK-81S0A0L1FJDHp1  efi  (255M)
>
> > This is complementary to Warner Losh's D45890 (loader version-check
> warnings).
> > Feedback welcome.
> Regards
> STefan
>


I've just pushed a kern.disks implementation following recent review
comments, and I'm wondering if that works for you?

https://github.com/RZA-SF/freebsd-patch-for-bug279829/blob/revision-2/src/efi_bootloader_update.sh


Best,
Ron