UEFI booting survey

[Arno de Vries]

On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 8:52 PM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> Greetings
>
> If you are booting off UEFI and have a bit of an unusual setup, I'd like
> you to drop me a line.
>
> The setup that I'm looking for is any case where you load boot1.efi off one
> drive (cd, ssd, hdd, nvme, etc), but don't have a FreeBSD system on that
> drive, but on a different drive on the system.
>
> An example of this may be loading boot1.efi off what FreeBSD would call
> /dev/ada0p1, but having root come from /dev/ada1p1.
>
> It's my belief that due to the fragility of this setup, few, if any, people
> have this setup. If you do, please take a minute to reply to this message.
> In the coming months, we're looking at dropping boot1.efi and instead
> installing /boot/loader.efi onto the ESP (most likely as
> \efi\freebsd\loader.efi). As part of the move to fully support the UEFI
> Boot Manager, we're dropping the 'search every device in the system' part
> of the current boot1 algorithm. It will be possible to configure the system
> to continue booting (either via the new efibootmgr which will allow any
> imaginable combination, or possibly via a fallback mechanism needed for the
> embedded EFIs that have poor UEFI Variable support at the moment), but as
> part of an upgrade to a future FreeBSD 12, some intervention will be
> necessary.
>
> Please let me know if you have an unusual setup like this.
>
> Warner
>

I use something similar in FreeBSD 11.1 .
I boot from an USB drive with an EFI partition and an UFS partition
containing only a modified loader.efi, loader.help,loader.conf and loader.rc
The reason is I came from a BIOS system with a root raidz pool on raw
disks.
and my new motherboard no longer supported legacy boot.

I had to modify loader.efi because it only probes partitions for zfs pools,
not disks (also see bug report 220105).
For those interested: comment out the 'continue' on
line 123 in /sys/boot/efi/libefi/efipart.c (r 313355)

I used info form
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2015-August/048141.html
to get it booting.

Arno

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