On 8/27/25 08:37, Russell Adams wrote:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2025 at 12:20:56AM +0900, Tomoaki AOKI wrote:
Question: is there any concept to get some proper version information
into these binaries, from which then some identity and the commit tag
could be retrieved from which they were created?
We used to encode the date the loader was built. Reproducible builds
stopped that.
Can't git hash (full or first 12 digits, possibly plus n**** number,
too) like in kernel help the situation? Yes, it shouldn't be suitable
for legacy bootcodes (wastes of bytes!), though.
Really I don't care if the data is embedded in the bootcode. I
understand it may be in a difficult format with limited space.
I'm not building my own here. I just want to be able to find out what
I have vs what was shipped.
I would expect that the OS distribution tools (freebsd-upgrade) can
verify the files I have installed, including the boot loader it is
shipping into /boot.
My understanding is freebsd-update leaves all boot loaders alone.
Having new ZFS code didn't break booting but upgrading a ZFS pool breaks
boot access to the pool without a corresponding boot loader update. That
was not just an EFI issue.
I forget where but recall someone wrote a script to try to detect a
difference and replace (or give instructions?) if different but it
didn't know what version anything is either. My attempt at writing a
check in my source based update scripts hasn't been correct yet but
again it was a non-version based difference check.
I'd like to be able to compare the checksums of bootloaders I have
from EFI against a table of checksums of the same files across
authentic distributions. Even if it was just a text file in /var that
freebsd-update uses or I could grep. I was disappointed that
"freebsd-upgrade IDS" never mentioned files in /boot.
I must manually update the bootloader when I upgrade FreeBSD. If I
mess up, or lose track, I need a way to find out what I have in EFI
against files shipped with FreeBSD.
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Russell Adams russell.ad...@adamssystems.nl
Principal Consultant Adams Systems Consultancy
https://adamssystems.nl/
