Re: How to boot FreeBSD14 without EFI?

On 2024-01-15 14:27, Dewayne Geraghty wrote:
> Thank-you Mathew its given me some hope . Seems that I need to be more 
> diligent and will reread the relnotes and updating notes from 12.4 
> through to 14.0R
> 
> Robert, I think you're right.  I installed the 14.0-RELEASE before I 
> noticed the efi check-box.  so yes I suspect a problem with my 
> 14.0Releng build (though I used the same settings for make.conf, 
> src.conf as I use in 13.2 and 12.4).
> 
> However when using a FreeBSD(32bit) virtual machine using 
> FreeBSD-14.0-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso as the only attached device:
> 
> a) with efi checked - boots to an EFI interface (startup.nsh) and 
> exit(s) into another interface to "Standard English"... "Continue" 
> loops back to UEFI shell.  I lack the knowledge about efi to get the 
> FreeBSD OS to start.

To get a UEFI system to boot, you need a EFI system partition. This is a 
FAT32 partition on your disk of about 100-1000 MB, which contains the 
.efi files to boot.

FreeBSD is the easiest OS to boot on UEFI. The loader.efi file is enough 
to get FreeBSD loaded.

I no longer daily-drive FreeBSD, but I can boot FreeBSD 14 just fine in 
a virtual machine in BIOS mode. Both VirtualBox on Fedora 39 and KVM on 
Rocky Linux 9.

> FYI: My original problem: I built from source 14.0Releng and upgraded 
> the 14.0Release without success.  I've also used two other vdi's 
> without success.  The upgrade used the git pull from 14.0Releng on a 
> 13.2S system as I'm hoping to migrate my fleet of 12.4S systems to 14 
> and figured that 13.2S was a safe build platform (as it also used clang 
> 16.0.6). I suspect something that I'm doing is at fault.  Unfortunately 
> the 6 other 12.4S and one 13.2 VM's are functioning so I doubt its the 
> Windows/Virtualbox, which points to my build/install.  Investigating 
> further.

Maybe just use 14 to build 14 instead of 13.2?

If you're building on Windows, you could also try using Hyper-V if 
you're not using a Home edition. Alternatively you could buy Parallels 
or build on a Linux PC with KVM.

> I appreciate your advice.
> 
> Kind regards, Dewayne.

No problem,

Neel