Has anyone tested UEFI with FreeBSD 10.1?

angryfirelord · 11-21-2014, 09:07 AM

I'm having some problems installing FreeBSD under UEFI. The image itself is able to boot ok under UEFI and I'm able to install it, but after rebooting there's no entry to boot from. Linux has a tool called efibootmgr, but that doesn't seem to exist under FreeBSD.

I've stuck with the default partition layout, which is a small efi partition followed by a / and swap partition. The installer doesn't set a mount for it by default. I've tried adding a mount point (such as /boot or /boot/efi), but it doesn't work either.

My suspicion is that the efi parition isn't being formatted correctly (the FreeBSD wiki does say that some EFI boards won't recognize a FAT32 partition formatted by FreeBSD) or that the EFI partition isn't being registered correctly. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of information out there, so I can only guess at this point. If anyone else has installed FreeBSD via UEFI, what did you have to do to get it to work?

ReaperX7 · 11-22-2014, 03:03 AM

You may want to look into the Grub-pcbsd port to use UEFI. You'll need to draft your grub.cfg using the package notes. If you need to boot, try using the DVD to load the system.

You may also need to try boot0cfg to automatically detect and install the FreeBSD boot loader as well.

angryfirelord · 11-26-2014, 09:59 PM

Thanks. I'll look into PC-BSD's installer and see how it works.

boot0cfg appears to be for MBR partitions.

mk2soldier · 12-21-2014, 02:46 PM

I'm also very interested in this possibility. Has the situation changed in this regard?

cynwulf · 12-22-2014, 03:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by angryfirelord

boot0cfg appears to be for MBR partitions.

Yes.

boot0config is usually used for installing the interactive boot manager or restoring the MBR. It is not exactly the bootloader, just one stage of the boot process. boot0 is actually the MBR code.

In a nutshell boot process is boot0 -> boot1 -> BTX server -> [boot2 -> loader] -> kernel -> init

You can use gpart to do the same on GPT disks.

Code:

% man gpart

ReaperX7 · 12-25-2014, 05:29 AM

You should have a boot, uefi, swap, and root partition setup at least with a GPT layout.

The layout should be (or close enough to this):

Code:

/dev/ada0a1 - /boot - UFS2
/dev/ada0a2 - /boot/efi - EFI
/dev/ada0a3 - swap - swap
/dev/ada0a4 - /(root) - ZFS or UFS2

Also... The UEFI disk should be used for UEFI installs, not the normal disk.

angryfirelord · 04-05-2015, 05:31 PM

Just as a followup to this, I was able to boot a EFI-enabled install in VirtualBox, but not on real hardware or in VMWare Player. If anyone else wants to try it in VBox (with a VM named FreeBSD), this is what I did to prepare it.

Code:

VBoxManage modifyvm FreeBSD --firmware efi
VBoxManage setextradata FreeBSD VBoxInternal2/EfiGopMode 1

I suspect the problem is that the EFI implementation in various motherboards is different. There is a bug filed that says it doesn't work on ASRock boards.

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/sh....cgi?id=195719