After a long time I had another look at the page https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI, where it still states "Support booting 64-bit FreeBSD on a 64-bit CPU from a 32-bit EFI environment" with status "Not Started". I would like to know if anybody is / will be working on that in the near future or not, as unfortunately I have a Notebook that comes with with an Intel Atom Baytrail CPU and a 32-bit EFI without the possibility of setting legacy BIOS mode and I would really love to install FreeBSD on that machine. That kind of CPU was sold quite a lot and there are a lot of other Notebooks with a 32-bit EFI, so it could be interesting for more people to see this feature implemented in FreeBSD. I don't know if it could make things easier if looking at the solution from NetBSD, which actually works since 9.3. (There, the installation media is recognized by the 32-bit EFI and the system boots until it shuts down later for some other reason, but this must be a another problem of NetBSD). Also, I would be happy to do testing if somebody started the work.
This was discussed recently and it looks like there is no active work done/planned here given Warner's answer (it's the other way around, it seems, without having a proper testing recipe): https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-current/2023-May/003636.html
How can this depend on the possibility to do testing on a qemo environment? What about real hardware? Does nobody have the possibility to test on real hardware but me? As I already said, I could do some testing. How can I propose this in the other thread you posted? I cannot log in there / answer.
I'm aware of someone trying to make this work, and he needed to make changes to make it work. I was on the fence about adding it (special cases for one person often times are more trouble than benefit), but now I'll put you in touch and you can report back. I've not had time to focus on evaluating this work, so I don't have any feel for its quality.
Hello Warner, thanks a lot for putting me in touch! As you have been informed already by my e-mails during the last few days, you already know that the bootia32.efi file that was forwarded to me works perfectly well on my Intel Atom Baytrail device! So we can actually say that the work is done! As I also explained in my e-mails, my overall impression of general performance and graphical performance on that Intel Atom Baytrail with Intel HD 620 Graphics is very positive! So as I have seen in the 14.0 Release Process that the code slush / KBI freeze is scheduled for the 4th of August 2023, so in a few days, I guess it would be possible to include the support for 64-bit machines with 32-bit UEFI firmware already, now that we know it works? As you said yourself in the mailing list last May, this was asked for in the forums many times, so I think that there are quite some people who would like to see that finally happen and could benefit from that. Another thing of course is missing hardware support for a few things, like the ACPI battery feature (but the person who developed the bootia32.efi and the patch for the bsdinstall script already said he was planning on doing that), the sound support and the Wifi module support. As for the latter, I have already seen an open request, where I will add my comment shortly: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=251063 Thanks!