Re: after trivial update, 15.0 ARM64 system no longer boots

[Mark Millard]

On Mar 25, 2024, at 00:51, Lexi Winter  wrote:

> Lexi Winter:
>> . . .
> 
> . . .
> 
> - even with the working keyboard, ctrl+alt+esc doesn't seem to work to
>  break into kdb when the problem occurs.  i'm not sure if i'm doing
>  something wrong here or that key sequence doesn't work over USB, so i
>  wanted to try it via a serial console instead, which led to...
> 
> . . .

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?ddb(4) reports:

QUOTE
Serial consoles can break to the debugger by sending a BREAK condition
on the serial line. This requires a kernel built with options
BREAK_TO_DEBUGGER is specified in the kernel. Most terminal emulation
programs can send a break sequence with a special key sequence or menu
selection. Sending the break can be difficult or even happen spuri-
ously in some setups. An alternative method is to build a kernel with
options ALT_BREAK_TO_DEBUGGER then the sequence of CR TILDE CTRL-B en-
ters the debugger; CR TILDE CTRL-P causes a panic; and CR TILDE CTRL-R
causes an immediate reboot. In all these sequences, CR represents Car-
riage Return and is usually sent by pressing the Enter or Return key.
TILDE is the ASCII tilde character (~). CTRL-x is Control x, sent by
pressing the Control key, then x, then releasing both.
END QUOTE

Note the lack of mention of the ctrl+alt+esc .

I expect that the:

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/developers-handbook/kerneldebug/

reference to "The default break-to-debugger sequence is Ctrl+Alt+ESC"
may be x86/i386 specific (historical tier 1) or have some other
specific type of context it applies to.

I've historically used ALT_BREAK_TO_DEBUGGER and its CR TILDE CTRL-B
on everything to get to the ddb> prompt via keyboards, including the
serial console. (But, thinking about it, I've not used that in some
time.)

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com

CURRENT 220ee18f1964 memstick kernel panic, MacBookPro8,3

[Graham Perrin]

Originally posted to 



Photograph: 



USB flash drive written from 
FreeBSD-15.0-CURRENT-amd64-20240314-220ee18f1964-268793-memstick.img.xz


Broadcom Wi-Fi-related, maybe? 





Reproducible in safe mode.

March 2024 stabilization week

[Gleb Smirnoff]

  Hi FreeBSD/main users & developers:

This is an automated email to inform you that the March 2024 stabilization week
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The tag main-stabweek-2024-Mar has been published at
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Re: after trivial update, 15.0 ARM64 system no longer boots

[Lexi Winter]

Lexi Winter:
> i am not really an expert on either ARM64 in general or on the RPi
> hardware in particular.  could anyone suggest how i could debug this
> problem, e.g. to get more information about why the system won't finish
> booting?

i dug into this a bit more, and to answer my own question:

- the boot failure that prompted the question appears to be a bug
  related to mmc, i reported it as PR 277884 [0].

- part of the problem, that i realise i forgot to mention in my initial
  post, was that my USB keyboard wouldn't work, so i couldn't interrupt
  the loader to use boot -v / -s / etc. or to access kdb.  this turned
  out to be an issue with the keyboard itself - a different keyboard
  worked fine.  the keyboard *does* work fine in FreeBSD once it's
  booted, which is odd; it's some $5 Amazon special, so i assume it just
  implements USB badly.

- even with the working keyboard, ctrl+alt+esc doesn't seem to work to
  break into kdb when the problem occurs.  i'm not sure if i'm doing
  something wrong here or that key sequence doesn't work over USB, so i
  wanted to try it via a serial console instead, which led to...

- i played around with USB OTG a bit to see if i could get a serial
  console that way.  FreeBSD does support serial over the OTG port (via
  the USB-C 'power' connector) and it works as a terminal in /etc/ttys,
  but neither U-Boot nor FreeBSD seem to be able to use it as a system
  console, which is a bit disappointing.  it would be nice if there was
  a way to get this working, because a serial console over USB would be
  very handy for working with these devices.

- in the mean time, i ordered a DB-9 serial HAT that connects to the
  UART to debug this and future issues.  once that arrives i can
  hopefully get some more info on the original problem.

regards, lexi.

[0] "RPi4: mmc broken with GENERIC-NODEBUG":
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=277884


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