Re: FreeBSD 14.1 and UEFI boot ignores bootme flag

On 2024-08-13 13:27, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 2:02 PM Chris <bsd-lists@bsdforge.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 2024-08-13 10:23, Tomek CEDRO wrote:
>> > On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 3:30 PM 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 :-)
>> >
>> > 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? :-)
>> >
>> I too found efibootmgr(8) unnecessarily cumbersome. So much so, that I
>> ended
>> writing
>> a script to use it more effectively.
>> 
> 
> Yea. it's designed to be Linux compatible, but it's a bit cumbersome to use.
> It has the advantage of being unambiguous, though.
> 
> 
>> In the end I downloaded a refind [1] image. Wrote it to a USB stick,
>> booted
>> it and
>> installed it. It's dead simple, just does the right thing, and just works.
>> Almost never
>> need to futz with anything. I'm no stranger to (U)EFI or the boot process.
>> But IMHO
>> FreeBSD is not (average) user friendly in the (multi) boot department.
>> Either
>> multiple
>> FreeBSD, or OS's. Maybe I should make a port out of refind, or get
>> permission
>> to integrate
>> some of it into $BASE.
>> 
> 
> REFInd is GPL'd, so that no can do.
> 
> 
>> 1.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REFInd
>> 
>> I'm currently using the 13.3.2 flashdrive image on a 15-current install
>> 
>> https://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.13.1/refind-flashdrive-0.13.2.zip/download
>> 
>> I simply unpacked it, and performed dd if=./refind-flashdrive-0.13.2.img
>> of=/dev/da0 bs=1m
>> I'm booting FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Slackware, and Windows11 on the laptop I'm
>> writing this from.
>> In your computer setup; simply choose refind as your default boot, and
>> your
>> done.
>> 
> 
> Yea, I've often thought that having a UEFI Menu choice for booting one of
> the many eifbootmgr options would be good to have. You can kinda sorta do it
> by having a good boot order and setting BootNext and exiting the boot
> loader,
> but there can be some issues if there's no efibootmgr entry for an OS.
> 
> Expanding the EFI lua bindings would be it possible to do nearly everything
> that REFIND can do. All the building blocks are there, but nobody's found
> the
> time to put them together.
ooh! I hadn't thought of that. You're right. Hell, forth would cover it, as 
well.

> 
> Also, gptboot.efi, though undocumented, makes the ping pong of nanobsd
> trivial. But even better is to use BEs with ZFS. I've largely moved to
> doing this
> for most things since it's so much more flexible...
> 
> Warner
> 
> 
>> HTH
>> 
>> --Chris
>> 
--Chris