RE: FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-22:23.vm (and related) could possibly use a note about updating the active loader

FreeBSD Errata Notices <errata-notices_at_freebsd.org> wrote on
Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2022 22:20:56 UTC :

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA512
> 
> =============================================================================
> FreeBSD-EN-22:23.vm                                       Errata Notice
>                                                           The FreeBSD Project
> 
> Topic:          Memory pages become unreclaimable
> . . .
> 1) To update your system via a binary patch:
> 
> Systems running a RELEASE version of FreeBSD on the amd64, i386, or
> (on FreeBSD 13 and later) arm64 platforms can be updated via the
> freebsd-update(8) utility:
> 
> # freebsd-update fetch
> # freebsd-update install
> # shutdown -r +5min "Installing errata update"
> . . .

A suggestion to put a copy of the potentially updated loader variant
of interest in place for actual use if desired might be a good idea.
As stands the binary update material gives no hint/reminder about
that step. (More than the binary update sequence might be appropriate,
it is just what I happened to do.)

As to why, my example went like . . .

# freebsd-update fetch
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 2 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 13.1-RELEASE from update2.freebsd.org... done.
. . .
The following files will be updated as part of updating to
13.1-RELEASE-p3:
/bin/freebsd-version
/boot/kernel/cam.ko
/boot/kernel/kernel
/boot/kernel/kernel.bin
/boot/kernel/zfs.ko
/boot/loader.efi
/boot/loader_4th.efi
/boot/loader_lua.efi
/boot/loader_simp.efi
. . .

After the install and reboot:

# ls -Tld /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/bootaa64.efi 
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1262604 May 12 07:56:22 2022 /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/bootaa64.efi
# ls -Tld /boot/loader.efi 
-r-xr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  1262588 Nov  4 01:45:05 2022 /boot/loader.efi

Note:

My 13.1-RELEASE media is not just a dd of the full content
from FreeBSD-13.1-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img.xz . I have
a swap partition and use GPT, not MBR, for example. Still,
I expect a fair variety of systems would not get automatic
use of the updated loader, whatever the details of the
13.1-RELEASE installation techniques that were originally
used.

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com