14.1 hosts booting off EFI: boot menu appears but cannot interact

We have multiple FreeBSD 14.1 hosts booting off EFI partitions on Cisco hosts (UCS C240 M7SX).

We are accessing the hosts via the KVM provided by the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller) of the host (I'd call that IPMI). We are running the latest CIMC firmware.

We are unable to get into single user mode because the keyboard is ignored during the splash screen countdown.

During the autoboot process, when the splash screen appears (with the options to go into single user mode, boot options, etc), we are unable to select any of those options, the countdown hits zero and the usual boot proceeds.  We want, and can't get into, single user mode. During the countdown, the entire keyboard is not functional (e.g. with pressing space, 1, 2, etc).

We have tried both the keyboard on our client and the virtual keyboard.

Once the boot process completes, the keyboard access is as expected.

We have tried console="comconsole,efi" in /boot/loader.conf - no help

We can ssh into the CIMC.  When reviewing the Cisco documentation, we don't see any configuration items related to screen interaction / mouse / USB.

While typing this up, we have discovered a workaround: setting autoboot_delay="NO" in /boot/loader.conf results in an active keyboard. We can then go into single user mode. However, to make that configuration chagne, we had to boot from a live-cd, import the zpool, mount, modify the file, etc.  Ideally, we'd prefer single user mode like decent people.

However, this workaround prevents the autobooting of the host. It allows us to fix the problem at the expense of needing to go the console and select an option after every boot.

In short, if we don't pause the server during, we don't get any keyboard interaction.

-- 
  Dan Langille
  dan@langille.org