Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 11:23:35 -0400 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: Mike Pritchard <mpp@mppsystems.com> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Red Neck <kcender07@yahoo.co.uk> Subject: Re: Loader broken in Head? Message-ID: <200711011123.35870.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <20071101013748.GA1116@mail.mppsystems.com> References: <862892.31020.qm@web27810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> <20071101013748.GA1116@mail.mppsystems.com>
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On Wednesday 31 October 2007 09:37:48 pm Mike Pritchard wrote:
> > On Friday 26 October 2007 08:03:21 pm Red Neck wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Within the last day (26/10/07) I've built and installed the sources
> > from CVS
> > Head only to find the stage 3 boot loader, /boot/loader, not working.
> > I'm
> > using a Mac Pro with 3 internal hard drives. On one hard disk I have
> > FreeBSD amd64 installed, occupying the entire disk (MBR). Using the
> sources
> > from Head, loader just freezes after displaying its initial messages
> with a
> > constantly spinning cursor. To access the system I have to revert to
> using
> > an older loader such as 6.2 release's. I have attached my make and
> kernel
> > config.
>
> I was seeing a similar problem. Booting from a floppy disk twice would
> probably be faster than booting off the hard disk. I had just done
> a makeworld, and updated the boot blocks on the disk (it previously had
> a pretty old install on it). But the system would eventually boot, and
> not hang up. I noticed that Red Necks boot loader build date was the
> same as the version I was having problems with.
>
> Fortunately, I have a 2nd HD in the machine with a 7.0 install,
> and installed the boot blocks from that HD to the one I was having
> problems with, and copied over /boot/loader from that HD.
> No more problems. System boots as fast as ever.
>
> So yes, I think there is something wrong with the current loader.
>
> With the slow boot, once the system is up and running, the disks
> are running at normal speeds (checked with iozone & bonnie).
Did you get the latest loader? For example, do you have this fix which might
result in significantly slower disk I/O since w/o it every disk I/O is
attempted 3 times with 2 drive resets in between:
jhb 2007-10-25 16:53:35 UTC
FreeBSD src repository
Modified files:
sys/boot/i386/libi386 biosdisk.c
Log:
Break out of the I/O retry loop as soon as an I/O operation succeeds rather
than always retrying operations three times.
Submitted by: nyan
Revision Changes Path
1.53 +2 -0 src/sys/boot/i386/libi386/biosdisk.c
--
John Baldwin
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