Re: FreeBSD 14.1 and UEFI boot ignores bootme flag

From: Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert_at_cschubert.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2024 18:31:30 UTC
In message <CANCZdfp56NwHwiOkjxWEnfACyge+nHL0CiSnf_NL5MNswpdHTw@mail.gmail.c
om>
, Warner Losh writes:
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> On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 11:24=E2=80=AFAM Tomek CEDRO <tomek@cedro.info> wro=
> te:
>
> > On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 3:30=E2=80=AFPM Daniel Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.=
> il>
> > wrote:
> > > (..)
> > > At some point I succeeded in deleting the dvd, but now I see its back.
> >
> > This may be added by BIOS / Setup :-)
> >
> > > So how do I add a second boot partition?
> >
> > Use efibootmgr as imp suggested and add another entry with desired
> > boot information, you may then select this new entry as the default.
> > It will show up in BIOS / Setup menu and you can change order over
> > there.. but the entry needs to be added with efibootmgr :-)
> >
>
> yea, efibootmgr -k is what's needed. You'll need to specify the partition
> to boot off of. That's the ideal solution.
>
>
> > No worries I had the same problem too some time ago, also found
> > reference to bootme flag which did not work (should be removed from
> > man pages?). Now I sometimes use F8 at boot to select different system
> > to boot.. but there are good looking menu like bootloaders for UEFI
> > like reEFInd [1], Clover [2], LibreBoot [3]. Maybe we need some more
> > documentation on this? :-)
> >
>
> These might work. bootme is only documented in the BIOS loader man
> page...
>
> There's also an unsupported, may go away in the future gptboot.efi
> that you can use if you really must use this setup.. We use it for bootable
> USB drives at work, but if it doesn't work for you, I'm not sure I'd fix
> bugs
> in it.
>
> However, we're moving to ZFS only, and we've found ZFS BEs to be way
> more flexible and will be the way of the future. As such, I've stopped
> maintaining gptboot.efi and will likely remove it in the future.

loader.efi also works with UFS.

My rescue disk contains:

slippy# gpart show da4
=>        40  1953525088  da4  GPT  (932G)  <-- /boot/pmbr
          40         472    1  freebsd-boot  (236K)  <-- /boot/gptboot
         512      532480    2  efi  (260M)  <-- /boot/loader.efi
      532992     4194304    3  freebsd-ufs  [bootme]  (2.0G)
     4727296    12582912    4  freebsd-swap  (6.0G)
    17310208     4194304    5  freebsd-ufs  (2.0G)
    21504512     4194304    6  freebsd-ufs  (2.0G)
    25698816    41943040    7  freebsd-ufs  (20G)
    67641856  1885883272    8  freebsd-zfs  (899G)

slippy#

This rescue disk (USB) boots on UEFI and legacy systems. (It contains 
enough tools and backups to restore an unbootable system to a bootable 
state.)


-- 
Cheers,
Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert@cschubert.com>
FreeBSD UNIX:  <cy@FreeBSD.org>   Web:  https://FreeBSD.org
NTP:           <cy@nwtime.org>    Web:  https://nwtime.org

			e^(i*pi)+1=0