The state of UEFI support in the Kernel and installer

From: fpqc ?? <harry.gindi_at_live.com>
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2016 16:16:57 +0000
I was reading this article from the 2013 Dev summit on UEFI:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/201305DevSummit/UEFI

In particular, I wanted to ask what is the status on these two goals (from the article):

The following issues exist:
- The installer needs to be taught about creating EFI System Partitions (if needed) or selecting an EFI System Partition to install our first- and second-stage boot code.
- The installer needs to be taught about creating EFI boot entries for our boot code once the kernel has an API for this.

Right now, as of the latest -Current image, the installer does not ask if an EFI System partition already exists, which is rather scary.  When doing a manual (expert) partitioning scheme, the installer should ask for the location of the ESP if it exists, and if no ESP is specified for mounting, the installer should warn that no bootloader will be installed.  

The other problem is that as far as I can tell, there is no code that creates the EFI boot entry in any case.  By default, the installer just moves either boot1.efi or loader.efi (not sure) to:
(ESP)/EFI/bootx64.efi,
which is the default location for EFI firmware.  I was wondering if the kernel has the requisite API/driver for adding EFI boot entries yet.  On (Arch) Linux, you can add an entry to the NVRAM with a tool called bootctl, which is part of the sd-boot package.  

Also, wondering if FreeBSD has any plan to add something like initramfs/EFIStub booting, which allows for much easier bootloader configuration with sd-boot than the current FreeBSD EFI bootloader, which must be chainloaded and has its configuration stored off of the ESP.  
Received on Tue Sep 06 2016 - 14:17:05 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Wed May 19 2021 - 11:41:07 UTC