LOADER.EFI(8)

NAME
loader.efi - UEFI kernel loader

DESCRIPTION
On UEFI systems, loader.efi loads the kernel.

loader.efi is invoked directly from the EFI System Partition (ESP) on systems installed using bsdinstall(8), when installed as the default EFI boot program as described in uefi(8) or when configured as an EFI boot entry with efibootmgr(8).

On systems upgraded from FreeBSD 10 or earlier, the EFI System Partition (ESP) can be too small to accommodate loader.efi. In such cases, boot1.efi(8) may be retained as the firmware boot program. It will chain-load the current /boot/loader.efi, which is updated during the installworld process. boot1.efi(8) is deprecated for new installations.

  Console Considerations
The UEFI firmware provides a generic console. In loader.efi this is selected by specifying “efi” using the console variable. loader.efi examines the 8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8c-ConOut UEFI environment variable to guess what the “efi” console points to. loader.efi will output its prompts and menus to all the places specified by ConOut. However, the FreeBSD kernel has a limitation when more than one console is present. The kernel outputs to all configured consoles. Only the primary console will get the log messages from the rc(8) system, and prompts for things like geli(8) passwords. If loader.efi finds a video device first, then loader.efi tells the kernel to use the video console as primary. Likewise, if a serial device is first in the ConOut list, the serial port will be the primary console.

If there is no ConOut variable, both serial and video are attempted. loader.efi uses the “efi” console for the video (which may or may not work) and “comconsole” for the serial on COM1 at the default baud rate. The kernel will use a dual console, with the video console primary if a UEFI graphics device is detected, or the serial console as primary if not.

On x86 platforms, if you wish to redirect the loader's output to a serial port when the UEFI firmware doesn't support it, or to a serial port that isn't the one the UEFI firmware redirects its output to, set console to “comconsole”. The default port is COM1 with an I/O address of 0x3f8. comconsole_port is used to set this to a different port address. comconsole_speed is used to set the of the serial port (the default is 9600). If you have console set to “efi,comconsole” you will get output on both the EFI console and the serial port. If this causes a doubling of characters, set console to “efi”, since your UEFI firmware is redirecting to the serial port already.

If your UEFI firmware redirects the serial port, you may need to tell the kernel which address to use. EFI uses ACPI's UID to identify the serial port, but loader.efi does not have an ACPI parser, so it cannot convert that to an I/O port. The FreeBSD kernel initializes its consoles before it can decode ACPI resources. The FreeBSD kernel will look at the hw.uart.console variable to set its serial console. Its format is described in uart(4). Set it to “io:0x3f8,br:115200” with the proper port address. PCI or memory mapped ports are beyond the scope of this man page.

The serial ports are assigned as follows on IBM PC compatible systems:
Windows Name | I/O Port Address | Typical FreeBSD device
COM1 | 0x3f8 | /dev/uart0
COM2 | 0x2f8 | /dev/uart1
COM3 | 0x3e8 | /dev/uart2
COM4 | 0x2e8 | /dev/uart3

Though COM3 and COM4 can vary.

  Primary Console
The primary console is set using the boot flags. These command line arguments set corresponding flags for the kernel. These flags can be controlled by setting loader environment variables to “yes” or “no”. Boot flags may be set on the command line to the boot command. Inside the kernel, the RB_ flags are used to control behavior, sometimes in architecturally specific ways and are included to aid in discovery of any behavior not covered in this document.
boot flag | loader variable | Kernel RB_ flag
-a | boot_askme | RB_ASKNAME
-c | boot_cdrom | RB_CDROM
-d | boot_ddb | RB_KDB
-r | boot_dfltroot | RB_DFLTROOT
-D | boot_multiple | RB_MULTIPLE
-m | boot_mute | RB_MUTE
-g | boot_gdb | RB_GDB
-h | boot_serial | RB_SERIAL
-p | boot_pause | RB_PAUSE
-P | boot_probe | RB_PROBE
-s | boot_single | RB_SINGLE
-v | boot_verbose | RB_VERBOSE

And the following flags determine the primary console:
Flags | Kernel Flags | Kernel Consoles | Primary Console
none | 0 | Video | Video
-h | RB_SERIAL | Serial | Serial
-D | RB_MULTIPLE | Serial, Video | Video
-Dh | RB_SERIAL | RB_MULTIPLE | Serial, Video | Serial

loader.efi does not implement the probe -P functionality where we use the video console if a keyboard is connected and a serial console otherwise.

  Additional Environment Variables
loader.efi loads some extra variables early in startup from /efi/freebsd/loader.env from the EFI partition. Only simple variables can be set here. It can be useful to specify the root filesystem:

    rootdev=disk0s1a

  Staging Slop
The kernel must parse the firmware memory map tables to know what memory it can use. Since it must allocate memory to do this, loader.efi ensures there's extra memory available, called “slop”, after everything it loads ( the kernel, modules and metadata) for the kernel to bootstrap the memory allocator.

By default, amd64 reserves 8MB. The staging_slop command allows for tuning the slop size. It takes a single argument, the size of the slop in bytes.

  amd64 Nocopy
loader.efi will load the kernel into memory that is 2MB aligned below 4GB. It cannot load to a fixed address because the UEFI firmware may reserve arbitrary memory for its use at runtime. Prior to FreeBSD 13.1, kernels retained the old BIOS-boot protocol of loading at exactly 2MB. Such kernels must be copied from their loaded location to 2MB prior starting them up. The copy_staging command is used to enable this copying for older kernels. It takes a single argument which can be one of

disable
    Force-disable copying staging area to 2M.

enable
    Force-enable copying staging area to 2M.

auto
    Selects the behaviour based on the kernel's capability of boostraping from non-2M physical base. The kernel reports this capability by exporting the symbol kernphys.

Arm64 loaders have operated in the ‘nocopy’ mode from their inception, so there is no copy_staging command on that platform. Riscv, 32-bit arm and arm64 have always loaded at any 2MB aligned location, so do not provide copy_staging.

Note. BIOS loaders on i386 and amd64 put the staging area starting at the physical address 2M, then enable paging with identical mapping for the low 1G. The initial port of loader.efi followed the same scheme for handing control to the kernel, since it avoided modifications for the loader/kernel hand-off protocol, and for the kernel page table bootstrap.

This approach is incompatible with the UEFI specification, and as a practical matter, caused troubles on many boards, because UEFI firmware is free to use any memory for its own needs. Applications like loader.efi must only use memory explicitly allocated using boot interfaces. The original way also potentially destroyed UEFI runtime interfaces data.

Eventually, loader.efi and the kernel were improved to avoid this problem.

  amd64 Faults
Because it executes in 64-bit long mode, the amd64 version of loader.efi is susceptible to CPU faults due to programmer mistakes and memory corruption. To make debugging such faults easier, amd64 loader.efi can provide detailed reporting of the CPU state at the time of the fault.

The grab_faults command installs a handler for faults directly in the IDT, avoiding the use of the UEFI debugging interface EFI_DEBUG_SUPPORT_PROTOCOL.RegisterExceptionCallback(). That interface is left available for advanced debuggers in the UEFI environment. The ungrab_faults command tries to deinstall the fault handler, returning TSS and IDT CPU tables to their pre-installation state. The fault command produces a fault in the loader.efi environment for testing purposes, by executing the ud2 processor instruction.

  i386 firmware on amd64 machines
Some devices have 64-bit (long mode) capable CPUs, but come with a 32-bit (protected mode) UEFI implementation. /boot/loader_ia32.efi is provided for such devices. It switches to long mode right before executing the kernel. Note that since the firmware expects its runtime EFI functions to be executed in 32-bit protected mode, EFI runtime services are not available to the kernel. Which means that programs like efibootmgr(8) will not work.

FILES

/boot/loader.efi
    The location of the UEFI kernel loader within the system.

  EFI System Partition
loader.efi is installed on the ESP (EFI System Partition) in one of the following locations:

efi/boot/bootXXX.efi
    The default location for any EFI loader (see uefi(8) for values to replace ‘XXX’ with).

efi/freebsd/loader.efi
    The location reserved specifically for the FreeBSD EFI loader.

The default location for the ESP mount point is documented in hier(7).

EXAMPLES

  Updating loader.efi on the ESP
The following example shows how to install a new loader.efi on the ESP. The exact placement is complicated due to the diversity of installations, setups and situations. In this section, paths that are all lower case are Unix paths. Paths that are all upper case are relative to the ESP mount point, though they may appear as lower case on your system because the FAT filesystem of the ESP is case insensitive.

Locate the ESP, which has its own partition type of “efi”:

    # gpart show nda0
    =>        40  7501476448  nda0  GPT  (3.5T)
              40      614400     1  efi  (300M)
          614440  7500862048     2  freebsd-zfs  (3.5T)

The name of the ESP on this system is nda0p1. By default, this will be mounted on /boot/efi. To check:

    # mount | grep nda0p1
    /dev/nda0p1 on /boot/efi (msdosfs, local)

If it's not mounted, you will need to mount it:

    # mount -t msdosfs /dev/nda0p1 /boot/efi

efibootmgr(8) reports what we booted from.

    # efibootmgr -v
    Boot to FW : false
    BootCurrent: 0001
    Timeout    : 2 seconds
    BootOrder  : 0000, 0001, 0003, 0004, 0005, 0006, 0001, 0008, 000A, 000B, 000C, 000E, 0007
    ...
    +Boot0001* FreeBSD ZPOOL HD(1,GPT,b5d0f86b-265d-1e1b-18aa-0ed55e1e73bd,0x28,0x96000)/File(\FIEEBSD
                                nda0p1:/EFI/FREEBSD/LOADER.EFI /boot/efi//EFI/FREEBSD/LOADER.EFI
    ...

Often there are several options, depending on the BIOS. The entry that we booted with is marked with a ‘+’ at the start of the line, as shown above. So in this case, this firmware is using /EFI/FREEBSD/LOADER.EFI from the ESP. Often times it will be the UEFI “default” loader, which varies by architecture.
Architecture | Default Path
amd64 | /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI
arm | /EFI/BOOT/BOOTARM.EFI
arm64 | /EFI/BOOT/BOOTAA64.EFI
i386 | /EFI/BOOT/BOOTIA32.EFI
riscv | /EFI/BOOT/BOOTRISCV64.EFI

However, care must be taken: some multiple-boot environments rely on a special bootXXX.efi to function. Before updating a bootXXX.efi file, make sure it is the FreeBSD boot loader before updating it:

    # strings /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI | grep FreeBSD | grep EFI
    FreeBSD/amd64 EFI loader, Revision 3.0

bsdinstall(8) copies loader.efi to the default name if there wasn't one there before. Check to see if they are copies before updating (with X64 substituted using the above table):

    # cmp /boot/efi/EFI/FREEBSD/LOADER.EFI /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOOTX64.EFI

Copy the loader:

    # cp /boot/loader.efi /boot/efi/EFI/FREEBSD/LOADER.EFI

replacing the all caps part of the example with the proper path.

If ESP path was /FREEBSD/LOADER.EFI and LOADER.EFI and BOOTX64.EFI were identical in the cmp step, copy the loader to the default location:

    # cp /boot/loader.efi /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI

Finally, if you mounted the ESP, you may wish to unmount it.

    # umount /boot/efi

SEE ALSO
loader(8), uefi(8)

BUGS
Non-x86 serial console handling is even more confusing and less well documented.

Sometimes when the serial port speed isn't set, 9600 is used. Other times the result is typically 115200 since the speed remains unchanged from the default.

U-Boot implements a subset of the UEFI standard. Some versions do not support fetching loader variables, so efibootmgr may not work. In addition, efibootmgr is not supported on armv7 or riscv. In these instances, the user has to understand what was booted to update it properly (and in most cases, it will be the FreeBSD path and the UEFI default so just copy loader.efi there if there are loaders there). Typically in these embedded situations, there is only one .efi file (loader.efi or a copy of loader.efi). The path to this file is typically the default removable path above.

Managing booting multiple OSes on UEFI varies greatly, so extra caution is required when updating the UEFI default loader.