Re: HELP: UEFI/ZFS Boot failure: Ignoring Boot000A: Only one DP found

On Thu, 22 Aug 2019 08:58:55 +0300
Toomas Soome <tsoome_at_me.com> wrote:

> > On 22 Aug 2019, at 06:04, O. Hartmann <o.hartmann_at_walstatt.org> wrote:
> > 
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA256
> > 
> > Am Wed, 21 Aug 2019 22:29:29 +0000
> > greg_at_unrelenting.technology schrieb:
> >   
> >> August 22, 2019 12:23 AM, "O. Hartmann" <ohartmann_at_walstatt.org> wrote:
> >>   
> >>> Am Wed, 21 Aug 2019 15:58:24 -0500
> >>> Karl Denninger <karl_at_denninger.net> schrieb:
> >>>   
> >>>> I would see if you can get REFIND loaded and use that.  I have a Lenovo
> >>>> X1 Carbon Gen 6 and that's the answer I used, as it allows multi-boot
> >>>> (e.g. Win10 and FreeBSD) easily.    
> >>> 
> >>> mmmhhh, Linux software to make FreeBSD boot? ;-)    
> >> 
> >> rEFInd is not "Linux software", I use it to get a nice menu to choose
> >> between FreeBSD and Windows on my desktop. No Linux in sight. If anything,
> >> rEFInd has its roots in Macs :)  
> > 
> > My apologizes; when searching the net, the first "logo" I see is this silly
> > penguine face. I'm sorry about making such simple implications.
> >   
> >>   
> >>> This Lenovo firmware seems very reluctant or the efibootmgr doesn't
> >>> operate properly on setting variables: when trying to label the boot
> >>> number (e.g. Boot000A) with "-L FreeBSD", it is always set back to
> >>> "Boot000A ATA HDD0". On other platforms, like Fujitsu servers or even the
> >>> cheap crap from ASRock a label once set is permenent until deleted.    
> >> 
> >> Many laptops just ignore the boot variables outright. My X240 is the same.
> >> I never switched to a proper efibootmgr setup on mine, I just have
> >> loader.efi as bootx64.efi and that's it.  
> > 
> > I tried copying loader.efi as bootx64.efi - but didn't help.
> >   
> >>>> If there's a way to get into the EFI shell on Lenovo's laptops from the
> >>>> BIOS during the boot I've not found it yet.  There's supposed to be on
> >>>> all EFI devices, but you know how "supposed to" works in many cases,
> >>>> right?    
> >> 
> >> You can just download the EFI Shell from the internet, it's a normal .efi
> >> executable you can "boot". Put it as efi/boot/bootx64.efi onto a USB flash
> >> drive and enjoy.  
> > 
> > I'll give this a chance as soon I have hands on the workitem again.
> >   
> 
> The reason to try rEFInd and/or EFI shell is to see if we get extra error
> messages otherwise hidden by GUI.
> 
> In any case, to get to the root cause, we would need to start to insert more
> debug printouts and see what we will find. Once you are ready to go with it,
> you can poke me directly and then we can start…
> 
> rgds,
> toomas
> 

Hello.

I spent the weekend fiddling around with the settings and I found out two
things:

the most important: my brain is leaking "emory", means: I had the same issue
with an APU from PCengines because of enabling "WITH_BEARSSL" in /etc/src.conf
on the machines where we built the main OS. I did so on the laptop we spoke of
in this thread - and forgot about that fact.

the other thing is the weird Lenovo handling of the UEFI vars. The only way to
boot the E540 (after(!) disabling _BEARSSL in src.conf and rebuilding
everything) was to set the loader's name to EFI/BOOT/BOOTx64.efi. Setting the
variable to contain EFI/BOOT/loader.efi failed as well as setting
EFI/FreeBSD/loader.efi. 

I also had to delete the Boot000A variable - it seems Lenovo's UEFI
implementation uses fixed variable sets (as I realized when not being able to
name label of the variable Boot000A by something I've choosen). Boot000A is
always labeled "ATA HDD0", no matter what I've tried to set it to via option
"-L" of efibootmgr.

Kind regards,
oh