RE: Some questions about the "new" console and the boot loader

Patrick M. Hausen <hausen_at_punkt.de> wrote on
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:56:43 UTC :

> I had hoped to meet Warner in Zagreb to discuss this over a beer which I would
> have happily paid for, or even some more, but he did not make it.
> 
> Ever since FreeBSD 14 a certain hardware platform that we rent at Hetzner showed
> this irritating and extremely difficult to debug problem:
> 
> . . .

I did some looking around for the status vs. the
documentation and there appears to be no documentation
in the man pages mentioning "eficom" that was added in
mid 2023. For:

# uname  -apKU
FreeBSD 7950X3D-ZFS 16.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT main-n280598-57d5a8feda3f GENERIC-NODEBUG amd64 amd64 1600000 1600000

(official pkgbase from on 2025-Sep-24) the search
for eficom and the results are:

# man -K eficom
#


So this console handling subject area may well be one
needing consultation with Warner instead of reading man
pages.


In case you want to look, the eficom commits to
main are from:


QUOTE
author Warner Losh <imp@FreeBSD.org> 2023-05-11 20:03:17 +0000
committer Warner Losh <imp@FreeBSD.org> 2023-05-11 20:06:03 +0000

commit 2f131435bc22540db2d3f6bf97e5f9fe7039f889 (patch)
tree 6dbcc069a318165f9827ca21f1ef5b631187b796
parent 86c31aca33ff771b845acbbed3b3659fde7e710f (diff)

stand: efi create eficom console device.
. . .
END QUOTE

through:

QUOTE
author Kyle Evans <kevans@FreeBSD.org> 2023-05-28 18:50:46 +0000
committer Kyle Evans <kevans@FreeBSD.org> 2023-05-28 18:54:50 +0000

commit 9ed4ec4ae34a9ecab0471f1dbf392729155d7411 (patch)
tree b47b4755066ec1e404c85a9aa36c8ed51bbd1f01
parent 697727110b68e483c320d834bcbcdf01c01142a1 (diff)

stand: libefi: avoid a null pointer deref in eficom
. . .
END QUOTE


For reference:

# ~/fbsd-branches-containing.sh 2f131435bc22540db2d3f6bf97e5f9fe7039f889
* main
  releng/14.2
+ releng/14.3
+ stable/14
  remotes/freebsd/HEAD -> freebsd/main
  remotes/freebsd/main
  remotes/freebsd/releng/14.0
  remotes/freebsd/releng/14.1
  remotes/freebsd/releng/14.2
  remotes/freebsd/releng/14.3
  remotes/freebsd/stable/14


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com