2016-12-17 9:21 GMT+01:00 Fernando Herrero Carr?n <elferdo at gmail.com>:
>
>
> 2016-12-16 23:56 GMT+01:00 Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com>:
>
>> On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 11:00 AM, Dimitry Andric <dim at
freebsd.org> wrote:
>> > On 16 Dec 2016, at 18:53, Antony Uspensky <uspensky at
x-art.ru> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Fri, 16 Dec 2016, Eric van Gyzen wrote:
>> >>> On 12/16/2016 11:39, Slawa Olhovchenkov wrote:
>> >>>> On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 06:08:34PM +0100, Fernando
Herrero Carr?n
>> wrote:
>> >>>>> Hi everyone,
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> A few months ago I got myself a new box and I have
been happily
>> running
>> >>>>> FreeBSD on it ever since. I noticed that the boot
was not as fast
>> as I had
>> >>>>> expected and I've realized that, while my disk
is GPT partitioned,
>> the boot
>> >>>>> process is still BIOS based:
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> % gpart show
>> >>>>> => 34 976773101
<976%2077%2031%2001> ada0 GPT (466G)
>> >>>>> 34 6 - free - (3.0K)
>> >>>>> 40 1024 1 freebsd-boot (512K)
>> >>>>> 1064 984 - free - (492K)
>> >>>>> 2048 67108864 2 freebsd-swap (32G)
>> >>>>> 67110912 909662208 3 freebsd-zfs (434G)
>> >>>>> 976773120 <976%2077%2031%2020> 15
- free - (7.5K)
>> > ...
>> >> I would shrink ada0p1 down to 128K (size of gptzfsboot = 88K
now) and
>> place efi partition (~800K) on free space between new p1 and p2. No
need to
>> touch swap partition.
>> >
>> > Yes, this is almost exactly what I have done on a machine that was
>> > originally installed with gptzfsboot on the first partition, which
was
>> > 512K. Since all the partitions on this SSD were aligned to 1M, I
>> > reduced the size of the first partition to 224K, freeing up a hole
of
>> > exactly 800K for an EFI partition:
>> >
>> > => 40 976773088 ada0 GPT (466G)
>> > 40 2008 - free - (1.0M)
>> > 2048 448 1 freebsd-boot (224K)
>> > 2496 1600 4 efi (800K)
>> > 4096 33554432 2 freebsd-swap (16G)
>> > 33558528 943214592 <943%2021%2045%2092> 3
freebsd-zfs (450G)
>> > 976773120 <976%2077%2031%2020> 8 - free -
(4.0K)
>> >
>> > Then I wrote the preformatted boot1.efifat image to it, using:
gpart
>> > bootcode -p /boot/boot1.efifat -i 4 ada0. You can also use dd of
>> > course, but I prefer using gpart for these kinds of manipulations.
>> >
>> > This way, you can choose between booting in old school BIOS mode,
or
>> > UEFI mode. If the UEFI mode works flawlessly, you can always
decide
>> > later to dump the freebsd-boot partition, and use only an EFI
partition.
>> >
>> > -Dimitry
>> >
>> > P.S.: The only thing that triggers my OCD here is that the EFI
partition
>> > has index 4, but is physically the second. But I can live with
that,
>> > until I finally delete the freebsd-boot partition. :)
>>
>>
>> You likely want to carve out more like 50MB instead of 800k for UEFI
>> partition. 800k is the minimum, but it also precludes many things you
>> may need to do with UEFI applications down the line.
>>
>> Warner
>>
>
> Thanks guys for all the answers, I think I will just nuke freebsd-boot
> and create a smallish efi where I can place boot1.efifat as suggested by
> Dimitry. If this works, I can always shrink swap if I really need to later
> on.
>
>
So, it worked!
I took a spare USB stick with a bootonly image and changed partitions there
first. Once I had it working I modified my hard drive's partitions,
installed efifat image with gpart, rebooted, and here I am.
Some conclusions:
* While getting to FreeBSD's loader seems a bit faster (or maybe that's
just confirmation bias), bringing up the system does not seem much faster.
* If anything, I have a slightly higher resolution console now.
* uefi(8) hints at gpart:
/boot/boot1.efifat
msdosfs(5) FAT file system image containing boot1.efi for
use by bsdinstall(8) and the bootcode argument to
gpart(8).
maybe a little example would help (gpart bootcode -p /boot/boot1.efifat
-i 1 ada0)
* Despite gpart(8)'s excellent BOOTSTRAPPING section, no mention is made to
booting from an efi partition there.
Best,
Fernando