FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE: UEFI booting from USB flash drive + FBSD system on HDD

[Christian Baer]

Am 25.12.2014 um 15:32 schrieb Julien Meister:

> Any idea on how to make this work with UEFI? From what I understood, EFI
> tries to boot on the first ufs partition found. It should be therefore
> [FILE]da0p2[/FILE] ... but it isn't.

Not really a way to make it work like you want, but have you (or rather 
why haven't you) considerd putting /boot on the HDD aswell? This way you 
can have everything else encrypted.

If you init the geli provider with the -b flag and make sure geli is 
loaded at boot time with geom_eli_load="YES" in the loader.conf, 
everything should work fine. /boot does now contain any sensitive 
information.

The reason I am suggesting this is because I have been nearly driven 
crazy by UEFI on several machines because the device names seem to 
change with nearly every boot. Admittedly, this is a problem I ran into 
with SuSE Linux at work, but the problem seems the same: The devices are 
"handed" to the kernel in a non-predictable order. Under SuSE this went 
so far that a computer with 2 HDDs would sometimes not boot, just 
because the kernel was fed the 2nd HDD as first. That is the short 
version of a reason I read in an article about SuSE and UEFI.

SuSE by default uses hardware UIDs. That however is absolutely useless 
if you are (like me at the time) installing the first of several 
identical workstations in order to create an image off the drive for the 
other machines.

I still haven't quite gotten on the good side of UEFI yet (see my other 
post) and I really hope there actually *is* a good side!

Best regards,
Chris