FreeBSD host, EFI guests, 6.1.18: F12 no longer presents the boot manager

[Graham Perrin]

With 5.2.44, if I recall correctly:

• F12 always successfully presented the boot manager.

With recent ​https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=567950 for the ports collection for FreeBSD:

• 6.⋯ became available (nothing earlier than 6.1.18 was in the collection)
• end of life 5.2.44 became legacy.

With 6.1.18, it seems:

• boot management is impossible for guests that use EFI.

The VirtualBox splash screen appears for no longer than a split-second (with and without keying F12), then there's the shell.

​https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=234878#c235 (comment 235) described the symptom but was – in the context of bug 234878 (emulators/virtualbox-ose: Update to 6.1) – not a show-stopper.

[Graham Perrin]

Example log, after changing the guest type from 64-bit FreeBSD to 64-bit Windows 10

[Graham Perrin]

Shell> (after not getting the boot manager)

[Derek Schrock]

Type exit to go to the EFI manager.

[Graham Perrin]

Replying to Derek Evan Schrock:

Thanks.

Is use of F12 deprecated with EFI?

[Derek Schrock]

Don't know but I think if there isn't an EFI bootable drive it will go to the shell (see the boot order).

I believe you can ask go directly to the EFI manager via escape. I can't find any meaningful documentation in the VirtualBox manual for EFI.

[Graham Perrin]

Booting from a file

[Graham Perrin]

Replying to Derek Evan Schrock:

… EFI manager via escape. …

Unfortunately not.

I can exit from the shell then:

• not boot from an ISO – maybe symptomatic of https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/19910#comment:7
• boot from the relevant file within the ISO.

[Graham Perrin]

I can't recall when symptoms disappeared, but this bug is no longer reproducible.

% pkg iinfo virtualbox
virtualbox-ose-6.1.46
virtualbox-ose-kmod-6.1.46
% uname -aKU
FreeBSD mowa219-gjp4-8570p-freebsd 14.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT amd64 1400093 #1 main-n264312-789df254cc9e-dirty: Tue Jul 25 11:18:53 BST 2023     grahamperrin@mowa219-gjp4-8570p-freebsd:/usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC-NODEBUG amd64 1400093 1400093
%