git: 2c26d77d989a - main - Remove /boot/efi from mtree, missed in 0b7472b3d8d2.

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 3/4/21 10:12 AM, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
>> On Thu, 4 Mar 2021 06:56:11 -0800 (PST)
>> "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd at gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> wrote:
>>
>>>> On 3/3/21 10:38 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 7:13 AM Nathan Whitehorn
>>>>> <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org <mailto:nwhitehorn at freebsd.org>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>      On 3/3/21 9:05 AM, Brandon Bergren wrote:
>>>>>      > On Wed, Mar 3, 2021, at 6:53 AM, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
>>>>>      >> What am I missing here?? One place I am being told this is run in
>>>>>      >> an environment that may not even be an EFI booted system, and in
>>>>>      >> another place it is being used as a test if something is mounted
>>>>>      >> on it, which should only be true on an EFI booted system.
>>>>>      > That the script in question is a generic script that runs as
>>>>>      part of bsdinstall on every platform and has to be universal.
>>>>>      >
>>>>>      > The actual *problem* here is that
>>>>>      usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts/bootconfig has a default case that is
>>>>>      >? ? ? ? ? ? ? *)? ? ? ? ? die "Unsupported arch $(uname -m) for
>>>>>      UEFI install"
>>>>>      >
>>>>>      > which then causes the main script to bail out, leaving the
>>>>>      system in a half-installed state.
>>>>>      >
>>>>>      > If that had just been an exit 0 this would have never been a
>>>>>      problem, I suppose.
>>>>>      >
>>>>>      > Before the original change that broke this, there was a check
>>>>>      that the script was not running on powerpc or mips platforms
>>>>>      before running the efi bits, but this got taken out.
>>>>>      >
>>>>>
>>>>>      Well, incidentally. The bootconfig script needs to know if there
>>>>>      is an
>>>>>      ESP it should configure, but the signalling mechanism (the
>>>>>      presence of
>>>>>      the ESP mount point) was being broken by mtree making that directory
>>>>>      unconditionally even on systems that don't use EFI. So then
>>>>>      bootconfig
>>>>>      tried to set it up, but failed later on, because there was no EFI
>>>>>      loader
>>>>>      to set up. The mtree change makes the ESP mount point only exist on
>>>>>      systems with an ESP.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> So you made a unilateral change, without discussion of the bigger
>>>>> design, to something without even asking the original person who made
>>>>> the change to mtree about it for what sounds like an obscure case in
>>>>> the installer that could be solved in a different way? It's trivial
>>>>> enough to look at the boot method sysctl and skip the EFI update if we
>>>>> didn't boot EFI (and if by change that's not on all systems, it's easy
>>>>> enough to add it on all systems). I have no notion about why that
>>>>> wasn't considered, at least, before jumping in and taking people by
>>>>> surprise.
>>> I still do not understand why machdep.bootmethod=EFI was rejected?
>>> Is this value not present on ALL platforms that boot in EFI mode?
>>> if exist(machdep.bootmethod) && machdep.bootmethod=EFI seems to
>>> me to be the best and valid way to make this decision.  If that
>>> has issues working on a platform we need to fix that issue and not
>>> do all this other stuff.
>>   We need to install and create the efi dir even if the installer is
>> booted in CSM mode, so a user can switch to full uefi mode after and
>> still can boot the FreeBSD that was installed. (The same thing must be
>> done for bios boot code).
> Ah, yes, ok, I see that issue, but isnt that driven by the fact
> the user has selected GPT (EFI) in the disk menu, so could be
> drive by an installer variable like any other aspect of the
> installer?  Passing around the users install parameters via
> the file system is fragile as noted else where, this information
> should be clearly avaliable within the installer script itself.
>
>

The installer does not maintain state internally and system 
configuration is decoupled from partition editing to avoid precisely the 
kind of fragility you are worried about.
-Nathan