GRUB2 for EFI in DragonFly?

karu.pruun karu.pruun at gmail.com
Wed Nov 21 00:26:38 PST 2018


Hello

My main OS is DragonFly, but I have multiboot settings with Mac OS,
Linux and FreeBSD on different machines and I use refind as the UEFI
boot manager. It works very well. When booting, refind will give you a
menu where you can choose the OS you want to boot. You can install
refind using a USB image or using Linux etc.

The caveat is that the DragonFly installer cannot install the system
in an arbitrary GPT partition, so you have to do a manual installation
if you want multibooting. Just boot up DragonFly's .img or .iso and
follow the example at the end of the gpt man page

https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=gpt&section=8

skip the first (five) lines, and start by creating a gpt partition and
then create the  a, b, d BSD partitions using the disklabel64. If you
want HAMMER2, replace HAMMER with HAMMER2. At the end, copy
DragonFly's /boot/boot1.efi to the EFI system partition into the
directory

/EFI/dfly/dfly_x64.efi

You will end up with such an entry for each OS, e.g. for FreeBSD you
have something like

/EFI/freebsd/fbsd_x64.efi

and linux and MacOS create several ones at installation, I have not
touched those. The filename is not important as long as you keep the
.efi extensions and to be on the safe side I keep names 8 chars.
(Although the latter depends on the exact type of the FAT filesystem
that is your EFI system partition.) Refind will scan for the efi boot
images at startup. Also note that when linux/MacOS update their
system, they tend to reset the default UEFI boot manager, so you have
to enable refind again. I do this by reinstalling refind using the
refind USB image.

Cheers

Peeter

--

On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 8:30 PM Dr. Martin Ivanov
<martin.ivanov at greenpocket.de> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> after successfully installing Dragonfly and OpenBSD in a multiboot setup on the same hard drive on an old BIOS machine, now I am planning to attempt to do the same on a new machine with UEFI Firmware. I googled a lot and it seems at some point I may be in need of the GRUB2 for EFI bootloader or elilo.  I simple
>
> pkg search grub2
>
> or
>
> pkg search elilo
>
> provides no output . Is it possible to install any of these packages on DragonFly?
>
>
> Thank you very much!
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
>
>



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