Somehow I’ve managed to mostly not care about UEFI until now. On my new laptop, I decided I should give it a go. There are some small benefits, nothing life changing, but booting multiple OSes is a lot easier, especially if they are UEFI-native, and you can get a nice frame buffer the boot manager and the OS can use before starting graphically (and after, if you don’t have accelerated graphics drivers).
For reference, how I run FreeBSD desktop/laptop: digital-life*
Install Windows 10 or other UEFI OS
It’s easiest if you install any other co-habiting OS first. Most OS installers assume they own the entire computer, and don’t let you know much about what they are really doing, especially when manipulating booting.
Windows creates a large 100MB EFI partition, plenty of room for refind and other boot loaders.
Leave free space during the installer or shrink the partition using Windows Disk Manager.
Boot into a FreeBSD 11+ live environment
We just need a live FreeBSD environment to conduct our manual install. Make sure it is 11.0 or newer for UEFI boot1 ZFS support.
The USB images with FreeBSD 11.0 and later -CURRENT snapshots have UEFI support integrated so they are directly bootable on UEFI machines. You could also use a CD/DVD or netboot.
Enable sshd, if needed
If you want to copy/paste from this blog to the machine being installed, bring up SSH.
mkdir /tmp/etc /tmp/root mount_unionfs /tmp/etc /etc mount_unionfs /tmp/root /root echo 'PermitRootLogin yes' >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config passwd
service sshd onestart
Bring up a network interface
We’ll need to grab refind during the installation.
Get a dhcp lease on your NIC or see the handbook for wireless setup**:
dhclient em0
Partition the drive
Add a couple GPT partitions. I’m doing a non-ZFS swap so I can coredump the kernel when doing FreeBSD development.
Create a 4k aligned zpool
Standard practice these days, 4k align everything even if it’s not a 4k-native disk. Create a mountpoint and the inital zpool.
kldload zfs
sysctl vfs.zfs.min_auto_ashift=12
mkdir /tmp/zroot
zpool create -f -o altroot=/tmp/zroot -O compress=lz4 -O atime=off -m none zroot /dev/gpt/zfs0
zpool export zroot
Boot environment compatible ZFS datasets
Nest the root dataset under ROOT so we can use boot environments in the future with beadm***:
Perform a manual install of the distribution
This is pretty easy.
cd /tmp/zroot ln -s usr/home home tar xvJpf /usr/freebsd-dist/base.txz tar xvJpf /usr/freebsd-dist/lib32.txz tar xvJpf /usr/freebsd-dist/kernel.txz chmod 1777 /tmp/zroot/var/tmp
Set a few things up
Set some common configurations. You may also wish to set up networking, enable SSH, etc in the altroot rc.conf.
echo 'zfs_enable="YES"' >> /tmp/zroot/etc/rc.conf
echo 'dumpdev="AUTO"' >> /tmp/zroot/etc/rc.conf
echo 'powerd_enable="YES"' >> /tmp/zroot/etc/rc.conf
echo 'sendmail_enable="NONE"' >> /tmp/zroot/etc/rc.conf
echo 'zfs_load="YES"' >> /tmp/zroot/boot/loader.conf
echo 'kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable="0"' >> /tmp/zroot/boot/loader.conf
echo 'kern.geom.label.gptid.enable="0"' >> /tmp/zroot/boot/loader.conf
printf "/dev/gpt/swap0\tnone\tswap\tsw\t0\t0\n" >> /tmp/zroot/fstab tzsetup -C /tmp/zroot chroot /tmp/zroot/ passwd
Install refind
UEFI has lots of bells and whistles. We’re going to use the refind boot manager. I’m relying on the “fallback” efi loader, bootx64.efi. You may need to toggle things around in your system’s firmware for that to work, or teach the EFI NVRAM about refind****. See the refind site for more details.
cd /tmp
fetch http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/refind/0.10.3/refind-bin-0.10.3.zip unzip refind-bin-0.10.3.zip
rm refind-bin-0.10.3.zip
mkdir /tmp/efi
mount_msdosfs /dev/gpt/EFI%20system%20partition /tmp/efi/
cd /tmp/efi/EFI/Boot
mv bootx64.efi bootx64-windows-10.efi
cp /boot/boot1.efi bootx64-freebsd.efi
cp -a /tmp/refind-bin-0.10.3/refind/icons .
cp -a /tmp/refind-bin-0.10.3/refind/refind_x64.efi bootx64.efi cp /tmp/refind-bin-0.10.3/refind/refind.conf-sample refind.conf
As good hygiene, you might consider updating bootx64-freebsd.efi whenever a point release is done. You could also keep an eye out for refind updates. This is easily done since it’s just a DOS filesystem.
Configure refind and add menu entries
Set the values of timeout, and scanfor to manual to speed things up a bit in refind.conf. Then add a couple entries:
cat << EOF >> refind.conf
menuentry "FreeBSD/amd64 -CURRENT" {
loader \EFI\Boot\bootx64-freebsd.efi
icon \EFI\Boot\icons\os_freebsd.png
}
menuentry "Windows 10 Professional x64" {
loader \EFI\Boot\bootx64-windows-10.efi
icon \EFI\Boot\icons\os_win.png
} EOF
Finish, reboot and enjoy!
That’s it. Unmount the efi partition and reboot.
cd umount /tmp/efi reboot
You should be greeted by refind, otherwise take a look through your firmware boot order and make sure the firmware nvram for Windows Bootmanager isn’t first.
GELI
Keep an eye out for GELI full disk encryption***** on top of ZFS on root.
Don’t forget to do the swap partition as well. http://kev009.com/wp/2016/07/freebsd-uefi-root-on-zfs-and-windows-dual-boot/
Thanks to
Most of this was cribbed from the following sources:
- Eric McCorkle, Steve Hart and others for adding ZFS boot and a ton of other improvements (GELI) to the FreeBSD UFI loader.
- Trond Endrestøl’s blog, for mentioning refind and the overall UEFI landscape on FreeBSD.
- Calomel, for a decent overview of manual ZFS on root installation.
- /usr/src/usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts/zfsboot for some ZFS specifics.
- An imaging script my colleague Jason Wolfe did for ZFS and boot envs at work.
*https://github.com/kev009/digital-life
**https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/network-wireless.html
***http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/beadm/
****http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
*****https://ericmccorkleblog.wordpress.com/2016/05/28/freebsd-geli-support/
About the Author:
Article comes from BSD Mag Vol.10 No.09 (85)
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