Re: CURRENT: EFI boot failure

Am Tue, 16 Sep 2014 17:32:12 -0400
Ed Maste <emaste_at_freebsd.org> schrieb:

> On 16 September 2014 17:03, O. Hartmann <ohartman_at_zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> >
> > In that case, is it still /boot/boot1.efifat or is it /boot/boot1.efi? What is the
> > difference? Is the efi partition FAT?
> 
> An EFI system partition (ESP) is a FAT-formatted partition with a
> specific GPT or MBR identifier and file system hierarchy; EFI firmware
> will try to load /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI from the ESP.
> 
> boot1.efi is an EFI application - that is, a PECOFF format binary.  It
> searches for a UFS filesystem and loads loader.efi from that.  It is
> intended to simplify the UEFI boot process, so that loader.efi, the
> .4th files, loader.conf etc. do not all need to be installed in the
> ESP.

Thank you very much for the explanation. Well, since I never see the loader screen as we
are used to, were is that gone? There are no boot options anymore (like single user mode,
ACPI off et cetera). Is this intended?

Besides, checking both boot1.efi and loader.efi with file() shows something like
loader.efi: PE32+ executable (EFI application) x86-64 (stripped to external PDB), for MS
Windows. So both are PECOFF format files?

> 
> boot1.efifat is a FAT filesystem image that contains a copy of
> boot1.efi as /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI.  It exists so that the installer
> can treat it as opaque bootcode, like other boot schemes.  It's
> certainly possible to create a partition, use newfs_msdos to format
> it, and copy in boot1.efi instead.

All right, here you lost me ... sorry. The partition created by the installes with type
"efi" is then the /EFI/ partition, which then contains a folder BOOT and in which the
boot1.efi is located? 
As I understand, I can manually mount this partition as FAT and copy boot1.efi as
BOOTX64.EFI into it? This knowledge could come in handy if something goes very bad.

> 
> > It is one disk, dedicated to FreeBSD (a laptop disk). Is there any documentation
> > readable for non-developer for that matter? I'm curious about how EFI works on
> > FreeBSD.
> 
> Better user-facing documentation is in progress; for now the best
> source is probably the wik.

Thank you.