At least on Intel single socket servers the UEFI firmware can't handle the msdosfs (FAT12) volume label"EFI ", which is currently used with "/boot/boot1.efifat" image (tested on 11-release, most likely also on 10.3-release). Firmware's boot process somehow confused the label "EFI" with the boot path, also containing EFI (as far as I remember the meaning of the failure message). Affected systems are S1200BT and S1200v3RP e.g. Simply reformatting with a different volume label solved the problem. According to Dimitry Andric, it's easily fixable for build process by changing the label name in "sys/boot/efi/boot1/generate-fat.sh". Sorry, I don't have sources handy right now, so no patch attached. Could suggest one of course, but would take longer to process the one from here instead of direct edit I guess ;-) Besides changing boot1.efifat, bsdinstall could be modified to work arround; but that's not the right thing IHMO. People affected (or unsure if they also suffer from this firmware obstacle) could try the following (assuming index 1 of /dev/da0's GPT is the EFI-sys-part): 'newfs_msdos -L DA0BOOT1 /dev/da0p1 && mount /dev/msdosfs/DA0BOOT1 /mnt' 'mkdir -p /mnt/EFI/BOOT && cp /boot/boot1.efi /mnt/EFI/BOOT/BOOTx64.efi' 'echo "BOOTx64.efi" > mnt/EFI/BOOT/startup.nsh && umount /mnt' Just in case this report is found while people are searching for solution… -harry
A commit references this bug: Author: kevans Date: Mon Apr 16 13:18:19 UTC 2018 New revision: 332561 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/332561 Log: Rename volume label for ESP Harry Schmalzbauer reports that some firmware, in his experience, trips over the ESP we install due to the volume label. It has been theorized that this is due to some confusion with the label and the path on the ESP to boot1.efi. Regardless, Harry found that renaming the label seems to fix it. PR: 214282 MFC after: 3 days Changes: head/stand/efi/boot1/generate-fat.sh
A commit references this bug: Author: kevans Date: Thu Apr 19 01:10:54 UTC 2018 New revision: 332746 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/332746 Log: MFC r332561,r332573: Rename volume label for ESP MFC r332561: Rename volume label for ESP Harry Schmalzbauer reports that some firmware, in his experience, trips over the ESP we install due to the volume label. It has been theorized that this is due to some confusion with the label and the path on the ESP to boot1.efi. Regardless, Harry found that renaming the label seems to fix it. MFC r332573: Regenerate FAT templates after r332561 PR: 214282 Changes: _U stable/11/ stable/11/stand/efi/boot1/fat-amd64.tmpl.xz stable/11/stand/efi/boot1/fat-arm.tmpl.xz stable/11/stand/efi/boot1/fat-arm64.tmpl.xz stable/11/stand/efi/boot1/fat-i386.tmpl.xz stable/11/stand/efi/boot1/generate-fat.sh