From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jan 12 10:42:03 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 449D91065687 for ; Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:42:03 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from rwatson@FreeBSD.org) Received: from cyrus.watson.org (cyrus.watson.org [65.122.17.42]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2097A8FC19 for ; Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:42:03 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from rwatson@FreeBSD.org) Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [65.122.17.41]) by cyrus.watson.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id BBE0546B06; Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:42:02 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:42:02 +0000 (GMT) From: Robert Watson X-X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: George Neville-Neil In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (BSF 1167 2008-08-23) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: GEOM and moving to CURRENT from 7.1 X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:42:03 -0000 On Sun, 11 Jan 2009, George Neville-Neil wrote: > Beware if you are upgrading from a 7.1 system to CURRENT that you may need > to have the kernel options GEOM_MBR and GEOM_BSD in your kernel. I spent a > couple of hours dealing with this on my Thinkpad X60 today which had, what I > thought, was a pretty simple setup of 1 slice for BSD, and a simple layout > of /, swap and /usr. When I tried to boot the new kernel I got to the mount > error prompt and could not mount ad4p1 or anything like it. Adding the > GEOM_MBR and GEOM_BSD options back into the kernel fixed things. Happily I > was able to boot 7.1 still and fix this. Just to follow up on George's post -- he and I spent a bit of time last night trying to reconcile the fact that he and a few other people found themselves without bootable kernels, while many people don't. For example, my VMWare VMs all seem to boot without a problem, perhaps due to having particularly boring and vanilla fdisk/bsd labeling. Certainly, it seems that the message in the short term when upgrading to an 8.x kernel, or sliding forward, is that some caution is required, so make sure you have a backup kernel in case things don't work out. (This is always true in -CURRENT, of course...) Robert N M Watson Computer Laboratory University of Cambridge