Re: Which version is BOOTX64.efi?

On Wed, Aug 27, 2025 at 10:08:19AM +0200, Peter 'PMc' Much wrote:
>   I am feeling increasing pain from finding EFI partitions floating
> around and containing spurious binaries in /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi,
> where there seems to be no means whatsoever for figuring out what
> these binaries do/are at all, or which version of it they would be
> and what they can support.
>
> Currently I am in the process of migrating from R.13 to R.14, and
> strangely the loader is now in the process of shrinking (from 862720
> to 662528), so even "the larger the newer" won't hold.
>
> Question: is there any concept to get some proper version information
> into these binaries, from which then some identity and the commit tag
> could be retrieved from which they were created?

I asked this same question on the forums:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/verify-loader-version.96446/

No one could answer the question "how do you know the bootloader is
authentic and matches the OS".

I was disappointed that the IDS output didn't even cover /boot.

Bootloaders are a critical part of the OS, and I just have to assume
that whatever is in /boot is current with the OS and should be blindly
copied to the EFI partition. I have no way to confirm what version of
bootloader I have, or what version is in EFI.

It's very frustrating. Please let me know if you find a solution.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Russell Adams                        Russell.Adams@AdamsSystems.nl
Principal Consultant                     Adams Systems Consultancy
                                          https://adamssystems.nl/