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UEFI(8) FreeBSD System Manager's Manual UEFI(8)

UEFI —
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface bootstrapping procedures

The UEFI Unified Extensible Firmware Interface provides boot- and run-time services to operating systems. UEFI is a replacement for the legacy BIOS on the i386 and amd64 CPU architectures, and is also used on arm, arm64 and ia64.

The UEFI specification is the successor to the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) specification. The terms are often used interchangeably.

The UEFI boot process loads system bootstrap code located in an EFI System Partition (ESP). The ESP is a GPT or MBR partition with a specific identifier that contains an msdosfs(5) FAT file system with a specified file hierarchy.

Partition Scheme ESP Identifier
GPT C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
MBR 0xEF

The UEFI boot process proceeds as follows:

  1. UEFI firmware runs at power up and searches for an OS loader in the EFI system partition. The path to the loader may be set by an EFI environment variable. If not set, an architecture-specific default is used.
    Architecture Default Path
    amd64 /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI
    arm /EFI/BOOT/BOOTARM.EFI
    arm64 /EFI/BOOT/BOOTAA64.EFI

    The default UEFI boot configuration for FreeBSD installs loader.efi in the default path.

  2. loader.efi reads boot configuration from /boot.config or /boot/config.
  3. loader.efi loads and boots the kernel, as described in loader(8).

The vt(4) system console is automatically selected when booting via UEFI.

UEFI bootstrap
/boot/loader.efi
Final stage bootstrap
/boot/kernel/kernel
default kernel
/boot/kernel.old/kernel
typical non-default kernel (optional)

vt(4), boot.config(5), msdosfs(5), boot(8), efibootmgr(8), efidp(8), efivar(8), gpart(8), uefisign(8)

EFI boot support for the ia64 architecture first appeared in FreeBSD 5.0. UEFI boot support for amd64 first appeared in FreeBSD 10.1; for arm64 in FreeBSD 11.0; for armv6 and armv7 in FreeBSD 12.0; and for riscv in FreeBSD 13.0.
February 22, 2021 FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE
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