On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 02:25:02PM -0500, Kyle Evans wrote:
> >   So one recipe doesn't even seem to make the freebsd-boot partition, so is 
> > it
> > optional for a pure UEFI boot?  Should we always gpart-bootcode it if it 
> > exists
> > and upgrade BOOTx64.efi when the EFI partition exists, or is there a few 
> > more
> > wrinkles we need to worry about?
> 
> Correct, freebsd-boot is not needed for a pure UEFI boot. I wouldn't
> necessarily bother updating the freebsd-boot partition unless you
> suspect you may need to switch back to legacy boot at some point; UEFI
> is now rock-solid on all of my systems, so I've personally found no
> such need and on many of them I've removed the old freebsd-boot bits.
> 
> If you've got an ESP, you should update that manually. If you want to
> maintain the option of legacy boot, you should use gpart-bootcode for
> that but don't use it on the ESP with boot1.efifat.

  I don't know why I would.  Its pretty hard to find a non-UEFI motherboard
these days and, as you've said, it's been pretty solid.  I don't think I said
it initially, but this originally started off of 12.0 boot media (~2019/5/31),
rather than me partitioning it by hand or some more modern 12.1+ stick.

> >   In any case, is it a logical theory that my possible boot-order problem
> > is because drive order got swapped and maybe one wasn't properly updated?
> > They seem to be the same:
> >
> >         # md5 /dev/nvd[01]p2
> >                 MD5 (/dev/nvd0p2) = 2ded438a2c97ea551446cc2d1d3b498e
> >                 MD5 (/dev/nvd1p2) = 2ded438a2c97ea551446cc2d1d3b498e
> >
> >   Ideally I'd like to have not boot through the UEFI boot menu every time.
> >
> >   I'm not sure why the drive order seems to matter right now.
> >
> 
> When you get booted back to the UEFI menu, is it a specific drive that
> you must select or do both equally work from that point?

  My options are basically M.2_1 and M.2_2 (not sure what labeled them, I think
that is the exact name, can confirm later).  #2 is currently the "first" drive,
and changing boot order in the BIOS to favor #1 doesn't seem to fix that.

  As I said, the motherboard died and the drives were moved to a new system
and I suspect that the order was swapped.  I never had a reason to question
my ability to boot from the 2nd disk, and hadn't done anything that merited
an upgrade that made me look at it this closely.

  Before I figured out what was going on, it would work some of the time.  I
suspect a race condition (where sometimes #1 would "win"), but I can't find
something that makes #2 a bad initial boot disk.  I don't see anything in
the boot messages that say which drive it had glommed onto.

  I can't say that I've tried to select #2.  I can try that later on today.
It's doing my weekly upgrade-build right now.

_______________________________________________
freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list
https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"

Reply via email to