FreeBSD 13.0 RC1 UEFI RAID-10 boot problems under VMware Fusio

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 2:22 PM Patrick M. Hausen <hausen at punkt.de> wrote:

> Hi Warner,
>
> > Am 09.03.2021 um 22:00 schrieb Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com>:One issue
> you may run into is the size of the partition. If it is tiny,
>
> > you'll likely have to create a new ESP. Using /boot/boot1.efi may help
> and
> > can be used in the last step instead of loader.efi, but it's much less
> > flexible than loader.efi.
>
> What precisely is the difference between boot1.efi and loader.efi?
> Practically from a sysadmin point of view? I have been using boot1.efi
> exclusively the last couple of years to boot EFI based systems with ZFS ...
>

boot1.efi is a less fully functional version of loader.efi. It doesn't let
you choose something else to boot. it doesn't have the ability to do some
advanced security options. It has no scripting. The project, with FreeBSD
13, will be recommending that people move to loader.efi where possible.
boot1.efi is still built, but likely should only be used for legacy
purposes for people that have a far-too-tiny ESP for loader.efi. It will
receive limited updates in the future and may be removed in the fullness of
time.

Due to the ZFS move to OpenZFS, boot1.efi needs to be updated anyway (well,
technically only if you migrate the zpool to the latest version), and most
installations would be better served by loader.efi being installed there
and/or migrating to efibootmgr to set a specific thing to boot. Though, due
to quality of BIOS implementation issues, efibootmgr's functionality varies
from vendor to vendor depending on how well they adhere to the standards.

I'm working on some text for the release notes to make all this clear and
in one place.

Warner