freebsd stable - Jul 2020 - 12.1p7 no longer boots after doing zpool upgrade -a

On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 8:32 AM Pete French <petefrench at ingresso.co.uk>
wrote:
>
>
>
> On 09/07/2020 14:24, Kyle Evans wrote:
>
> >> gpart bootcode -p /boot/boot1.efifat -i 1 ada0
> >> gpart bootcode -p /boot/boot1.efifat -i 1 ada1
> >
> >
> > This method of updating the ESP is no longer recommended for new 12.x
> > installations -- we now more carefully construct the ESP with an
> > /EFI/FreeBSD/loader.efi where loader.efi is /boot/loader.efi. You will
> > want to rebuild this as such, and that may fix part of your problem.
>
> Out of interest, how should the ESP partition be upgraded then ? I dont
> have any EFI machines...yet. But one day I will, and I was assuming that
> an upgrade would be done using the above lines too.
>
We haven't quite standardized on a good process yet, IMO, but for
right now the correct process is to just mount the ESP and replace
loader.efi with your system's updated /boot/loader.efi. At some point
we'll standardize a mountpoint for the ESP and mount it by default as
is done on at least some other OS.

On 09/07/2020 14:36, Kyle Evans wrote:
> We haven't quite standardized on a good process yet, IMO, but for
> right now the correct process is to just mount the ESP and replace
> loader.efi with your system's updated /boot/loader.efi. At some point
> we'll standardize a mountpoint for the ESP and mount it by default as
> is done on at least some other OS.
Ok, that makes sense. Still curious as to why the other method might 
fail though - as Karl points out in the other email, its just doing a 
direct copy of the image file, so if the iamge is built correct then I 
am surprised it wont work under all circumstances.

But thanks for the info - will file this away for when I have to install 
an EFI machine. cheers,

-pete.