Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2017 07:27:52 -0700 From: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: boot1.efi future Message-ID: <20c83f27-42d3-fd4d-1e4f-adf1b74857ee@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfqWSqjdRGetoiscEKJ_dNf3JgOQ2S9mzA0v1mP9PGAy=g@mail.gmail.com> References: <CANCZdfqWSqjdRGetoiscEKJ_dNf3JgOQ2S9mzA0v1mP9PGAy=g@mail.gmail.com>
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On 10/17/17 16:18, Warner Losh wrote: > I'd like to remove boot1.efi. It's no longer relevant. It was a useful hack > to get us going, but now it's becoming more of a liability than a win. > > There's a lot of work that has been put into it so it can understand every > filesystem. However, in doing so boot1.efi has morphed into a loader.efi > without the scripting interpreter. Let's just kill boot1.efi and load the > full-featured loader directly. > > boot1.efi used to have a role to play. It was a tiny, rarely changing bit > of glue in the UEFI world. It is now none of those things. It has become > rather large and bloated, and there's work to make it even more so. > > My proposal is to fix the one bug in loader.efi that would preclude its use > as a primary boot loader (it sometimes guesses wrong for currdev and > loaddev). Once we've done that, we'll use it where we use boot1.efi today. > It would also simplify the load process and make it easier to implement the > full EFI Boot Manager protocol from the UEFI specifications. It should also > make secure boot easier to bring to market. > > This dovetails nicely into some of the other changes on-tap for FreeBSD 12. > efibootmgr is coming soon (I'm reviewing the code from a coworker now). > There's plans to move the FreeBSD boot loader to > \efi\FreeBSD\loader-$ARCH.efi when that goes in, since we'll be able to > point the LoadOptions to that. There's plans to make the installer create > the EFI partition rather than just dd the efifat file we're doing today. > Plus, there's work underway to move all the boot block installation stuff > to a new script (install-boot) as well as efforts to make images for any > bootable system (spin). > > There's lots of details to get right before we can make the final switch, > but I think it's in the interest of the project to do so. > > Comments? As the guy who wrote boot1.efi in the first place, I think this is a great idea. boot1.efi exists to make the boot flow on EFI more like non-EFI so that loader can live in /boot on filesystems (UFS, ZFS) that EFI doesn't understand, thus preventing the need for a bunch of special logic in make installworld. It has seriously outlived its usefulness. Thanks for doing this! -Nathan
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