Need to change FreeBSD boot menu output from Serial to Video

[terminus]

Hi everyone!

I have a strange problem with my FreeBSD desktop. Somehow boot menu settings changed from "Cons: Video" to "Cons: Serial". Now I have to manually change this at every reboot. If I leave it as "Serial" my system is unable to start.
How can I permanently change this setting back to "Cons: Video"?
Looks like "console=" parameter in /boot/loader.conf is not correct answer.

My FreeBSD version is 12.3-RELEASE-p5

 

[SirDice]

If I leave it as "Serial" my system is unable to start.

It does start, it just doesn't show anything on the screen because it outputs the console to that serial port. That may appear as if it's not doing anything.

 

[Geezer]

How can I permanently change this setting back to "Cons: Video"?

loader.conf

www.freebsd.org

 

[terminus]

loader.conf

www.freebsd.org

I already have studied this man page but I am unable to find correct solution
As I told setting console= to "vidconsole" or "efi" is not enough.

There is one thing in loader.conf man page what confuses me.
How exactly loader determines state used during previous boot stage? Where he stores this information?

During initialization, loader will probe for a console and set the
console variable, or set it to serial console ("comconsole") if the pre-
vious boot stage used that.

 

[SirDice]

Old school boots use three stages, loader is the 3rd.

Chapter 15. The FreeBSD Booting Process

An introduction to the FreeBSD Booting Process, demonstrates how to customize the FreeBSD boot process, including everything that happens until the FreeBSD kernel has started, probed for devices, and started init

docs.freebsd.org

But most of that went out the window with EFI boots. That just loads loader.efi directly, skipping the first and second stages.

 

[terminus]

I was able to resolve this issue by updating my FreeBSD version from 12.3 to 13.1, and by updating UEFI loader to the new version.
Now I have new fancy boot menu with correct Console setting and new cool-looking Console

My system installed in UEFI only mode. ada0p3 is GELI with ZFS on top of it:

# gpart show ada0
=> 40 468862048 ada0 GPT (224G)
40 409600 1 efi (200M)
409640 2008 - free - (1.0M)
411648 4194304 2 freebsd-swap (2.0G)
4605952 464254976 3 freebsd-zfs (221G)
468860928 1160 - free - (580K)

Update of UEFI loader after upgrade from 12.3 to 13.1:

mount -t msdosfs /dev/ada0p1 /mnt
cd /mnt/efi/boot
mv ./BOOTx64.efi ./BOOTx64-old-12.3
cp /boot/loader.efi ./BOOTx64.efi
cd && umount /mnt && shutdown -r now

It would be nice if loader update also would be included (or at least documented) as part of "freebsd-update upgrade" procedure.