Re: Interest in Add UEFI boot options project and some design questions

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 07:30:00PM +0530, Gautam Agrawal wrote:
> I had a few questions regarding the expected scope and design direction of
> this project:
> 
>    1. Boot entries and BootOrder
>    While installing NetBSD using sysinst in a UEFI setup, I observed that
>    the installer copies bootx64.efi to the fallback path
>    (EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI), but does not create a Boot#### entry. As a result,
>    the firmware lists it as a generic ?MISC DEVICE? instead of something like
>    ?NetBSD 10.x?.

Yes, because at the time the sysinst(8) part of the (U)EFI installs was
done, the userland tool efi(8) did not yet exist.

Now with the existing tool the directory should be different and a boot
options variable should be set via efi(8).

>    2. Multi-boot support approach
>    To support multi-boot scenarios, I was considering two possible
>    approaches:

The project idea was to just be able to select boot options via the
UEFI boot menu. Note that the current installer does not understand
anything about adding a new NetBSD installation to a disk that already
has other OSes installed - it may work by plain luck since other OSes
usually do not use the fallback path for the bootloader.

There is no need to modify anything in the bootloader or the kernel,
just work on the installer (and testing).

Martin