pfSense

The pfSense-boot package relies on the existence of a /dev/msdosfs/EFISYS geom label to mount the EFI DOS partition and update the EFI loader. For bsdinstall based installs which UEFI boot (versus legacy BIOS), the EFI partition is automatically created without the user specifying it (at least in the guided install), however the script that does this is largely or entirely vanilla from upstream FreeBSD and does not add the pfSense expected DOS label to the filesystem, and we have no additional script that performs this operation.

Direct emmc images for Netgate appliances do not exhibit this problem so far, but there exists a possibility that at some time in the past the label for the DOS partition was not used.

In pfSense itself, we need a routine that runs probably at rc.bootup and looks for the efi partition and the DOS label on its filesystem, and restores it if missing. We also need bsdinstall supplemented to add this label to installs that use UEFI to boot, but that may be appropriate for a separate issue.