Re: Which version is BOOTX64.efi?

On 2025-08-27 9:13, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 27, 2025 at 10:00 AM Mel P. <list_freebsd@bluerosetech.com 
> <mailto:list_freebsd@bluerosetech.com>> wrote:
> 
>     If loaders had the version and patch level hardcoded into them it
>     during
>     the build like how that information is hardcoded into freebsd-version,
>     would that be a reproducible build?  If so, can EFI loaders with ZFS
>     support also have the OpenZFS version?  For example:
> 
>     FreeBSD/amd64 EFI loader, Revision 1.1, 13.5-RELEASE, OpenZFS-2.1.15
> 
>     Those two version numbers would be immensely helpful when moving disks
>     or verifying upgrades.
> 
> 
> Yea, that's not going to happen. The loader is independent of the 
> release, in many ways, 13.5-RELEASE comes from the kernel, and this 
> would introduce a coupling between the two. We generally don't have the 
> OpenZFS version available. We don't sync to OpenZFS releases, 
> necessarily. Also, the boot loader only makes limited use of the OpenZFS 
> code, so its version wouldn't necessarily help you. There's often a lag 
> between OpenZFS code hitting the tree and the boot loader understanding 
> new items introduced by that import.

This is very good to know, thank you.

> We can report the _FreeBSD_version for the tree we build in, though. And 
> that will give you information. We don't currently bump it, though, when 
> we add ZFS features to the whitelist of enabled features, but could. 
> This would make it still reproducible.

__FreeBSD_version would be just as helpful.

That feature whitelist is exactly the information needed when figuring 
out if a given loader can boot a given pool and fs.  Would it be 
possible to include that in the loader in a way that strings or some 
other utility can find it?