Resuming old EFI project

[Kim Shrier]

On Sep 15, 2014, at 10:33 AM, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org> wrote:

> 
> On 09/15/14 05:09, Eric McCorkle wrote:
>> On 09/14/2014 17:13, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>> 
>>>>> What specifically are you looking to work on?
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Well, I had been trying to get it to boot on a mac EFI implementation
>>>> as well.  There's some funny things that have to happen there
>>>> (notably, an HFS+ image).
>>> 
>>> People seem to have had luck with our FAT32 EFI system partitions on
>>> macs so far, but this in general is one of the big missing bits: hunting
>>> down weird firmwares, testing them, and fixing them when they don't
>>> work. We also need the EFI boot1 both to (a) have a better algorithm for
>>> finding the right UFS partition to boot from and (b) learn how to boot
>>> from ZFS as well as UFS.
>> 
>> I have a 100% ZFS system, so the current boot block doesn't work for me (though I can tell it's being loaded and run).  GELI should probably be added to that list as well...
>> 
>> I assume the best thing would be to link in the ZFS code?  Or would it be better to install loader into the system partition as well?
>> 
> 
> It's hard to integrate having loader on the ESP with the way loader and installworld work, so better to keep it on UFS/ZFS. The sparc64 boot1, on which the UEFI boot1 is based, has ZFS support already, so that's the place to look I think.
> -Nathan

I have a mac-mini server that I purchased in October 2013.  I would like to use GPT on the internal drives and boot FreeBSD.  I currently have the drives using MBR and booting FreeBSD 10.0. I understand that in order to use GPT instead, I have to have an Apple_boot partition that would then boot FreeBSD.  Are the UEFI code and disk partitioning tools able to handle this?  I am also interested in switching from UFS to ZFS.  Is that possible?

I have looked around in the source some, and it appears that most of the pieces are there but maybe not tested.  I am willing to use this mac-mini as a test bed and I would be willing to help iron out any issues.

Kim