Hi Scott,
In short all I can give is a vague suggestion: fix|update the bootcode
for FreeBSD 13.3, along with any "/boot/loader.conf" & "/etc/rc.conf"
settings which could be causing issues.
I am recreating this reply; had deleted the original mails already.
Reference:
https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-questions/2024-September/005640.html
https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-stable/2024-September/002368.html
I have heavily reformatted & edited original mail to make sense of the
situation. My questions are for own clarification, or to gain
information
for others to possibly help.
Scott B wrote ...
One is a laptop with an AMD A6 CPU
...
The peripheral storage is a SanDisk SATA 476.9 GB SSD limited to
SATA-2 speeds
...
This is the machine with which I am currently ssh'ed into a system
at sdf.org, where I deal with email.
The other computer is a Dell tower with a Core2 Extreme (QX9650) CPU
...
The peripheral storage devices are two ~.9 TB HDDs and six ~1.86 TB
or larger capacity HDDs.
The two smaller drives and two of the larger drives are attached to
the four available internal SATA-2 ports,
and three of the other drives are attached to USB 3.0 ports on
add-in cards on the motherboard.
The last drive is attached to a port on a Jmicron ESATA port at
SATA-1 speed.
AMD laptop - Email use
- FreeBSD 13.1*
- SanDisk 477 GB SSD -- EXternal, SATA 2
Dell Exterme - tower
- FreeBSD 12.2*
- 2x 0.9 TB HDD -- INternal, SATA 2
- 6x 1.86+ TB HDSs
-- 2x 1.86+ TB -- INternal, SATA 2
-- 3x 1.86+ TB -- INternal, USB 3
-- 1x 1.86+ TB -- EXternal, SATA 1
The two smallest drives are the boot devices and are each
partitioned with the boot loader's UFS2 partition,
a a partition containing one component of a two-way ZFS mirror that
is a boot partition with a pool name of "system".
There is also a small partition on each for the crash dump area on
one and /var/crash (UFS2) on the other. There is also a 2 GB
partition on each drive for a GEOM mirror that supports a UFS2
partition for an application.
Lastly, most of the remaining space on the two small drives are a
two-way ZFS mirror containing /usr/home and potentially other file
systems. That pool's name is "local".
The four remaining pools have several things, including the two
remaining pools ("rz7A", a raidz2 pool with 6 components totalling
~10.4 TB, and "zmisc", comprising two mirrored vdevs and totalling
99 GB)
and three small GEOM mirrors of varying sizes GEOM-concatenated
together to hold a UFS2 file system for a work area for ccache trees
and WRKDIRPREFIX for portmaster(8).
"system", "local", and "rz7A" are all on GELI-encrypted partitions.
"zmisc" is not encrypted.
Could you post the partition layout by "gpart" or whatever else
("fdisk"?) works?
Partitions as I understood on 2x small disks ...
UFS
----
- boot - ? GB
- crash-dump - ? GB
- var/crash - ? GB
- <application> - 2 GB GEOM mirror
ZFS
----
- "system" - ZFS mirror, bootfs - ? GB; GELI
- "local" - ZFS mirror; /usr/home + etc - rest GB; GELI
Presumably on some combnination of the larger, 1.86+ TB disks with far
too many partitions without knowing the layout; partitions ...
ZFS
----
- "rz7A" - RAID-Z2 ~10.4 TB; GELI
- "zmisc" - ZFS mirror 2x, 99 GB
UFS
---
- concat'd 3x GEOM mirror, gmirror, as UFS2 fs
For many years I have been uprading FreeBSD from source, but decided
to try the freebsd-update(8) process when 13.2-RELEASE was released.
Looks like that was on the laptop (see later for context).?
I did that and quickly discovered that it had completely undone much
or all of my OS configuration, especially the network configuration,
that I had tailored to my needs, so I wasted seemingly endless hours
over weeks repairing all that into some semblance of usable form.
"freebsd-update" asks about how to merge files or informs that it would
not
touch the files (that is based on my experience on FreeBSD 1[34]; do not
know,
or care, how it behaved before).
Meanwhile I had proceeded with source upgrade of the tower to
12.3-RELEASE-p[x].
#Dell Exterme- is now on 12.3*
When 13.3-RELEASE became available, I first did a source upgrade on
the laptop. Running "make installworld" rendered the laptop
unbootable.
What steps were taken during source upgrade? What were the steps
before "make installworld"?
but eventually I removed the SSD from it and loaded it into a USB
3.0 docking station and attached it to the tower and replicated its
entire pool ("sysroot") into my largest pool attached to the tower.
"sysroot" just made the appearance!
Then I reinstalled the SSD into the laptop.
After downloading the 13.3-RELEASE ... writing it to a thumb drive,
I booted that on the laptop and installed 13.3-RELEASE from scratch.
#AMD laptop- is now on 13.3-R
That experience delayed my upgrading the tower to 13.3-RELEASE-p1
for several months, although I had compiled it on the tower and had
it ready to install, but first I had upgraded the tower to
12.4-RELEASE-p2.
#Dell Exterme- 12.4*
Finally I dared to try it a day and several hours ago. I first
created a boot environment to preserve the current system and also
made a snapshot of all ZFS file systems in order to have a potential
rollback point before beginning the installkernel step.
#Dell Exterme- in process of updating to 13.3
I did that, completed the etcupdate steps, and then did a "shutdown
-r now".
What options(modes) of "etcupdate" were used & when?
Looks like did not update the boot loader.
Hopefully did not update the ZFS boot pools.?
After the boot loader asks me for the GELI passphrase for the boot
pool, I now get the following.
Calculating GELI Decryption Key for disk0p2: 1563240 iterations...
BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.02
After those two lines the blinking cursor jumps up three lines and
moves to the beginning of the line--not sure which happens first
because it's too fast.
After a delay of several seconds, it jumps two lines down and
repeats the delay and downward jump two or three times, then jumps
to two lines above the bottom line of the screen. After a lengthy
delay it jumps to the bottom line.
After a much longer delay the cursor jumps three spaces to the right
and never moves after that point and is unresponsive, although
CTL-Alt-Delete
can still cause a BIOS reset and eventual attempt at reboot.
Could you post a video of the boot process; or a photo or text where
the boot has stuck? I do not see a point, however, if all that would
show the "BTX loader ..." text as quoted.
Does enabling "verbose" booting show any more text? Or, could not
even reach the stage to enable that?
Since posting the above I have taken the pair of boot drives out of
the tower
...
connected that to the laptop, and rewritten the boot code onto each
with
'gpart bootcode', but that doesn't seem to have changed anything.
How/What was the exact command was used to set up the bootcode?
- Anubhav
--
