Re: Review D58990: freebsd-update: automatically update EFI and BIOS bootloaders on install

> On 20. Aug 2026, at 18:00, Mark Millard <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On 8/19/26 22:41, Marco Moock wrote:
>> Am 19.08.26 um 18:30 schrieb Ronald Pagani Jr (ronald.pagani.jr):
>>> The problem: freebsd-update updates /boot/loader.efi on the root
>>> filesystem,
>> 
>> Why is that located there if it is redundant on the ESP?
>> Chainloading?
> 
> buildworld then installworld populates the DESTDIR's boot/loader.efi
> even in contexts where there is no ESP and/or boot/efi is not a mount
> point for an ESP. For example, directory trees for which chroot or jail
> use is what is involved. Also, Some DESTDIR are not for self hosted
> systems updating themselves --but for targeting having a copy of
> materials for some other type of system.
> 
> boot/loader.efi is the one place there is always a file copy.
> 
>> 
>>> but the UEFI firmware boots from loader.efi on the EFI System
>>> Partition — a separate FAT32 partition that freebsd-update never touches.
>> 
>> How do pkgbasified systems handle this?
>> 
> 
> As stands, they do not automatically do so. As far as I know, no
> standard way of installing/updating FreeBSD does yet when an appropriate
> ESP exists: always a separate copy step done other ways is involved for
> the ESP update.
> 
> -- 
> ===
> Mark Millard
> marklmi at yahoo.com
> 

The illumos update does version based update - the installboot program does automatically update boot programs (for UEFI and BIOS) when new files have higher version and downgrade can be done manually, with force flag. For reasons, the version is currently built into boot loader binaries, but thats just an implementation specifics.

rgds,
toomas