Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 11:00:48 +0100 (BST) From: Chris Hedley <freebsd-current@chrishedley.com> To: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Subject: New builds won't boot Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.0906051045400.1724@teapot.cbhnet>
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Hi all, I was wondering if anybody has any suggestions for me. Since around January this year, I've been unable to get new builds to boot on my system: they go through the usual kernel initialisation stage, reach the "ZFS is an experimental feature" message, sometimes followed a few other random notices, and then it hangs indefinitely. I've just regressed to a version from mid January which boots without any problems, though ZFS from that point is unstable enough that I'm unable to update any of the packages on the security alerts list without it locking up, so it's not ideal. I've tried various approaches to see if I can find out what was the problem. I did read that GEOM_MIRROR has displayed similar problems in recent versions, especially if combined with k8temp, oddly, but disabling one or other, or both, or making it part of the kernel, and various other trial-and-error configurations haven't yielded any success. Other attempts have been to try a build both with and without SMP, turning off optimisation in CFLAGS and numerous other fiddles that I can't recall now. A further complication is that USB appears also to be broken in the newer versions, so although I can break out into the debugger, the keyboard doesn't work from that point onwards. Not that it makes a lot of difference as I'm not really sure what to look for. It is also worth noticing that a build of GENERIC also has the above two problems so I'm not entirely convinced it's a configuration issue unless there's something weird in my loader.conf, which is as follows if it looks suspect to anybody: #geom_mirror_load="YES" geom_label_load="YES" geom_eli_load="YES" nvram_load="YES" zfs_load="YES" vm.kmem_size="1536M" vm.kmem_size_max="1536M" vfs.zfs.arc_min="512M" vfs.zfs.arc_max="1024M" vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=1 # vfs.zfs.zil_disable=1 vfs.root.mountfrom="zfs:tank/root.2009.01" kern.maxfiles="25000" My system setup is a uniprocessor Opteron 248 in a Tyan Thunder dual processor motherboard with 3GB registered/ECC RAM. I use ZFS for my main storage array in a RAIDZ2 configuration spread across eight of its 10 partitioned SATA discs; the system boots off one component of a GEOM_MIRROR enabled partition to avoid any need for zfsboot and related issues. I'm wondering if it might be ZFS that's the problem here. I'm not especially enthusiastic about giving it up, so might I be better off migrating to Solaris, do you think? Any suggestions would be welcome!
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