EFI boot: can we make loader.efi work as BOOT{x64, aa64, arm, ia32}.efi?

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 07/30/16 23:20, Xin Li wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I finally got some time to explore the UEFI boot process (kudos to
> everyone who made this work!) and getting myself familiarize with the
> basics.
>
> One quick question -- Is there some technical restriction that prevents
> us from merging boot1.efi and loader.efi into one binary?
>
> Cheers,
>

No technical reason (and, in fact, when you boot from CD, that's how it 
works). The reason they are different is that we traditionally don't 
mount the EFI partition and so make installworld can't replace things 
there. boot1.efi is a basically static piece of code that doesn't need 
updates and can load loader, which does get updates, from a UFS/ZFS system.

loader.efi additionally assumes that it is started from the same 
partition that contains the kernel, loader.conf, fstab, etc., which are 
also generally not on the EFI partition (except in the CD case).
-Nathan