When will the FreeBSD (u)EFI work?

[Kyle Evans]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 6:19 PM Rebecca Cran <rebecca at bsdio.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/29/20 6:11 AM, Tomoaki AOKI wrote:
>
> >
> > 3. based solution looks good to me.
> >
> > IMHO, assuming /efi/bootx[64|32].efi is boot1.efi or loader.efi
> > or EFI environment pointing to either one is properly used,
>
>
> That's another thing: we should be installing loader.efi as
> \efi\boot\bootx64.efi (as well as \boot\freebsd\loader.efi) since it's
> entirely possible to lose the Boot Manager entry and end up with an
> unbootable system as a result. Unfortunately people have had bad
> experiences with other operating systems overwriting bootx64.efi and
> don't believe we should do that.
>

I have mixed feelings about this -- symlinks don't exist on FAT,
right? So then the maintenance overhead goes up, as you can always
replace \EFI\FreeBSD\ bits, but you need to make sure \EFI\BOOT
components are actually 100% without-a-doubt yours before you replace
them.

I'd be in favor of installing to \EFI\BOOT\... as well if and only if
the file doesn't already exist, assuming we can figure out how to make
it not a maintenance nightmare -- which I suspect would just mean that
we have some tool that users use to update the ESP rather than
instructing them to examine/replace files manually.

Thanks,

Kyle Evans