Netbooting FreeBSD with PXE/UEFI

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 16:11:10 +0000

Dear Future Me,

I guess you came here googling for “FreeBSD PXE UEFI” trying to find out how to netboot your x86 dev box. Or arm64 box. Who knows what you’re hacking on in the future. To do that you need follow these simple steps:

Put loader.efi to tftpboot dir
Configure dhcpd along these lines:

host amd64 {
        hardware ethernet  b8:ae:ed:77:88:99;
        filename "loader.efi";
        option root-path "/src/FreeBSD/tftproot/amd64";
        fixed-address 192.168.10.102;
        option routers 192.168.10.1;
}

Make sure root-path is in /etc/exports.
If you use MINIMAL-derived config add your NIC driver to /boot/loader.conf:

if_re_load="YES"

That’s pretty much it.

Pxe on FreeBSD developer's notebook

Netbooting FreeBSD with PXE/UEFI