12.1p7 no longer boots after doing zpool upgrade -a

[Kyle Evans]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 8:50 AM Pete French <petefrench at ingresso.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 09/07/2020 14:36, Kyle Evans wrote:
> > We haven't quite standardized on a good process yet, IMO, but for
> > right now the correct process is to just mount the ESP and replace
> > loader.efi with your system's updated /boot/loader.efi. At some point
> > we'll standardize a mountpoint for the ESP and mount it by default as
> > is done on at least some other OS.
>
> Ok, that makes sense. Still curious as to why the other method might
> fail though - as Karl points out in the other email, its just doing a
> direct copy of the image file, so if the iamge is built correct then I
> am surprised it wont work under all circumstances.
>

Yeah, so there's two problems here:

1.) That image is not built the way >= 12.x installations operate by
default. It will install an ESP with an \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.EFI (or
something like this) while we now, by default, setup
\EFI\FreeBSD\loader.efi and the appropriate efibootmgr to point at it.
In the former setup, that's actually /boot/boot1.efi which may or may
not do GELI correctly in the new world order -- I don't recall, it's
kind of special.

2.) That invocation clobbers anything else that might've been trying
to reside on your ESP. If you had any kind of dual-boot setup going
(perhaps rEFInd + grub + freebsdloader) then you've immediately hosed
it by overwriting the partition completely.

Thanks,

Kyle Evans