Not sure if this is the correct place.... (laptop, dual-boot EFI)

[Kyle Evans]

On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 6:30 PM Jonathan Chen <jonc at chen.org.nz> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 26 Jan 2019 at 13:00, Karl Denninger <karl at denninger.net> wrote:
> [...]
> > I'd like to repartition it to be able to dual boot it much as I do with
> > my X220 (I wish I could ditch Windows entirely, but that is just not
> > going to happen), but I'm not sure how to accomplish that in the EFI
> > world -- or if it reasonably CAN be done in the EFI world.  Fortunately
> > the BIOS has an option to turn off secure boot (which I surmise from
> > reading the Wiki FreeBSD doesn't yet support) but I still need a means
> > to select from some reasonably-friendly way *what* to boot.
>
> The EFI partition is just a MS-DOS partition, and most EFI aware BIOS
> will (by default) load /EFI/Boot/boot64.efi when starting up. On my
> Dell Inspiron 17, I created /EFI/FreeBSD and copied FreeBSD's
> /boot/loader.efi to /EFI/FreeBSD/boot64.efi. My laptop's BIOS setup
> allowed me to specify a boot-entry to for \EFI\FreeBSD\boot64.efi. On
> a cold start, I have to be quick to hit the F12 key, which then allows
> me to specify whether to boot Windows or FreeBSD. I'm not sure how
> Lenovo's BIOS setup works, but I'm pretty sure that it should have
> something similar.
>

Adding a boot-entry can also be accomplished with efibootmgr. This is
effectively what the installer in -CURRENT does, copying loader to
\EFI\FreeBSD on the ESP and using efibootmgr to insert a "FreeBSD"
entry for that loader and activating it.