On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 8:03 PM, John <freebsd-lists at
potato.growveg.org>wrote:
> Hello -stable,
>
> Got a new computer the other day. It has a UEFI bios. I downloaded the
> latest builds of 10-stable and 11 from allbsd, and also downloaded
> pc-bsd 10-R.
>
> Although I could install all three, for the freebsds the system would
> not get to the loader prompt. All I got was a blank screen and the
> cursor hopping around in the top left quadrant of the screen.
>
> In contrast to this, when I installed pc-bsd and the system rebooted, it
> was able to fully boot as expected. Why is this? I suspect it's due to
> UEFI but, unlike a server I look after, this machine does not appear to
> have a legacy bios.
>
> Now, while I have nothing against pc-bsd, I'm used to getting the base
> install sorted then installing what I need out of ports, probably
> because I'm an old fart who has been using freebsd as a desktop since
> 2.2.5. How can I make the proper BSD bootable after install in the face
> of UEFI ? How does pc-bsd overcome this limitation?
>
> [whoops, just looked at https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI - has anyone here
> got this to work?]
>
I'm using the projects/uefi branch and it works well.
Generally, you need to
* Build loader.efi
This is built in the process of buildworld of that branch.
* Install loader.efi to EFI partition's /EFI/FreeBSD
* Build and install an EFI kernel
Notice that traditional kernel cannot be booted with loader.efi
* Copy /boot to EFI partition's /boot
kernel is not needed, only the scripts and config files.
* Change /boot/loader.conf in the EFI partition. You may want to specify
bootfile="part5:/boot/kernel/kernel" // or other partition
vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:gpt/root" // or other partition
* Boot with FreeBSD's loader.efi
In my laptop, you can create a new boot entry and specify that one as
the boot loader in BIOS. Currently, I'm using rEFInd to chain-load
freebsd's loader.efi and it works well.
For bootstrap, my laptop can still boot up the install media (using legacy
boot loader), so I can mount the root partition after loading the kernel
from the install media, and build and install the necessary items.
You can find the EFI partition as a small fat partition on the disk.
Notice that you also need to replace syscons with vt to get a usable
console.
Good Luck!
> thanks,
> --
> John
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--
Cheers,
Henry