EFI, UEFI, PXE: FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso boot from SAN device failed, error 0x7f22208e

[Dave Hayes]

On Tue, 29 Dec 2020 14:40:17 +0700
Victor Sudakov <vas at sibptus.ru> wrote:
> Dave Hayes wrote:
> > > > > Was this happening over network (PXE boot) or from a physical medium
> > > > > like USB drive/CD-ROM ?    
> > > > 
> > > > Actually both. However, this thread implied that the mfsBSD/ramdisk
> > > > techniques did not work, and I wanted to provide a datapoint to the
> > > > contrary.
> > > > 
> > > > We have one installation which gets the ISO image over FTP and boots
> > > > from that,    
> > > 
> > > Can you please elaborate on that? Is this installation using UEFI or
> > > legacy mode loader? What tools are used? pxelinux/memdisk or anything
> > > else?  
> > 
> > This particular installation is a Dell DRAC that has the capability of
> > booting given an http url for a bootable iso. There actually is still some
> > problem booting the hybrid disk in BIOS mode, but UEFI works just fine.
> > Highly effective on an isolated network.   
> 
> Ah, is this more like IPMI booting, where you can attach an ISO image to
> the IPMI console which has its own networking stack, management
> interface etc?

I am not too familiar with IPMI, but what you describe is what we have been 
working with.

> Therefore my cheat sheet for making a UEFI bootable freebsd UFS volume is
> like this:
> 
> gpart create -s gpt ada1 # will become ada0
> gpart add -s200M -t efi ada1
> gpart add -s2G -t freebsd-swap ada1
> gpart add -t freebsd-ufs ada1
> gpart bootcode -p /boot/boot1.efifat -i 1 ada1    
> 
> Instead of "gpart bootcode -p /boot/boot1.efifat -i 1 ada1" we can just
> as well run 
> "newfs_msdos /dev/ada1p1 ; mount_msdosfs /dev/ada1p1 /mnt ; rsync -r ... /mnt"

Of course my 'cheat sheet', being /usr/src/release/amd64/mkisoimages.sh
is probably amd specific, and I don't ever put boot code on a hard disk these
days unless I have to. Nevertheless, I seem to be using /boot/pmbr as the
actual boot code and I have the GPT image being created with mkimg(1) which
gets dropped into the iso by dd(1). 

UEFI appears to be sensitive to large sizes of mfsroots. I had to make
EFI_STAGING_SIZE 300 and NKPT 220 to get this to all work properly.
-- 
Dave Hayes - Consultant - LA CA, USA - dave at dream-tech.com
>>>> *The opinions expressed above are entirely my own* <<<<

One of the most common defenses against really learning
something is to believe that one knows it already.