Hey everyone,
I am trying to boot up FreeBSD on a UEFI only laptop and failed so far. Here is some backstory
I am a long time Linux user and wanted to try out FreeBSD as a desktop OS. I plugged in my second hard drive and passed it through a kvm machine then installed FreeBSD and all that jazz. When I configured my system inside that kvm machine i tried to boot it up bare metal on my laptop but could not find find that drive as an option in my boot menu. After digging a bit i found out that my FreeBSD installation is using legacy BIOS (while using GPT) but my laptop is UEFI only and cannot boot in legacy mode at all (2021 laptop so fairly new). Back in my linux machine booted that kvm machine back up and looked around.
First thing I found was that it was actually booting with legacy mode while running as a vm aswell (sysctl machdep.bootmethod returns BIOS). Now the question remained if I can make it boot using UEFI and completely ignore legacy mode. I opened up FreeBSD wiki and found this https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI but i cannot figure out what exactly i need to do on an existing installation. Apparently there is a freebsd-boot partition which is 512K big (Don't exactly know why exists because /boot is located on my main freebsd-ufs partition and not that freebsd-boot and i could not mount the boot partition either) and i was thinking of resizing freebsd-ufs and creating a fat32 partition and do the same thing the UEFI wiki did
Is this the right way to do it? Wouldn't it be easier to install grub2 on FreeBSD? does grub2 on FreeBSD even support UEFI? (Not dual booting with my linux machine but having a grub bootloader for each of my drives and i do not like dual booting it feels very dirty)
I am a bit lost in where I should look into.
Best regards
I am trying to boot up FreeBSD on a UEFI only laptop and failed so far. Here is some backstory
I am a long time Linux user and wanted to try out FreeBSD as a desktop OS. I plugged in my second hard drive and passed it through a kvm machine then installed FreeBSD and all that jazz. When I configured my system inside that kvm machine i tried to boot it up bare metal on my laptop but could not find find that drive as an option in my boot menu. After digging a bit i found out that my FreeBSD installation is using legacy BIOS (while using GPT) but my laptop is UEFI only and cannot boot in legacy mode at all (2021 laptop so fairly new). Back in my linux machine booted that kvm machine back up and looked around.
First thing I found was that it was actually booting with legacy mode while running as a vm aswell (sysctl machdep.bootmethod returns BIOS). Now the question remained if I can make it boot using UEFI and completely ignore legacy mode. I opened up FreeBSD wiki and found this https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI but i cannot figure out what exactly i need to do on an existing installation. Apparently there is a freebsd-boot partition which is 512K big (Don't exactly know why exists because /boot is located on my main freebsd-ufs partition and not that freebsd-boot and i could not mount the boot partition either) and i was thinking of resizing freebsd-ufs and creating a fat32 partition and do the same thing the UEFI wiki did
newfs_msdos -F 32 -c 1 /dev/da0p1
mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0p1 /mnt
mkdir -p /mnt/EFI/BOOT
cp /boot/loader.efi /mnt/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi
Is this the right way to do it? Wouldn't it be easier to install grub2 on FreeBSD? does grub2 on FreeBSD even support UEFI? (Not dual booting with my linux machine but having a grub bootloader for each of my drives and i do not like dual booting it feels very dirty)
I am a bit lost in where I should look into.
Best regards