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Date:      Tue, 16 Sep 2014 17:32:12 -0400
From:      Ed Maste <emaste@freebsd.org>
To:        "O. Hartmann" <ohartman@zedat.fu-berlin.de>
Cc:        FreeBSD Current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org>, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org>, Allan Jude <allanjude@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: CURRENT: EFI boot failure
Message-ID:  <CAPyFy2AicKf-PWGDnq80Zmm8ukwTkURZm8RRUFxdfHK=Xd7XAQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20140916230348.189e80cd.ohartman@zedat.fu-berlin.de>
References:  <20140916020541.03c18d04.ohartman@zedat.fu-berlin.de> <54178607.1060305@freebsd.org> <541786BE.6010105@freebsd.org> <20140916075121.29989a53.ohartman@zedat.fu-berlin.de> <5417E20D.8070607@freebsd.org> <20140916230348.189e80cd.ohartman@zedat.fu-berlin.de>

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On 16 September 2014 17:03, O. Hartmann <ohartman@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
> In that case, is it still /boot/boot1.efifat or is it /boot/boot1.efi? What is the
> difference? Is the efi partition FAT?

An EFI system partition (ESP) is a FAT-formatted partition with a
specific GPT or MBR identifier and file system hierarchy; EFI firmware
will try to load /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI from the ESP.

boot1.efi is an EFI application - that is, a PECOFF format binary.  It
searches for a UFS filesystem and loads loader.efi from that.  It is
intended to simplify the UEFI boot process, so that loader.efi, the
.4th files, loader.conf etc. do not all need to be installed in the
ESP.

boot1.efifat is a FAT filesystem image that contains a copy of
boot1.efi as /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI.  It exists so that the installer
can treat it as opaque bootcode, like other boot schemes.  It's
certainly possible to create a partition, use newfs_msdos to format
it, and copy in boot1.efi instead.

> It is one disk, dedicated to FreeBSD (a laptop disk). Is there any documentation readable
> for non-developer for that matter? I'm curious about how EFI works on FreeBSD.

Better user-facing documentation is in progress; for now the best
source is probably the wik.



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