freebsd stable - Jan 2019 - Not sure if this is the correct place.... (laptop, dual-boot EFI)

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.

Cheers.
-- 
Jonathan Chen <jonc at chen.org.nz>

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.