FreeBSD Glitches

This page deals with issues that I encountered with FreeBSD and for which a proper description of the problem and/or a solution is not readily available elsewhere.

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Fresh FreeBSD installation does not boot

With my oldish Q6600 based systems using Intel DP965LT main-boards, during a fresh installation of FreeBSD using a GPT partition scheme, I consistently get the message: 
No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key
when rebooting the new installation for the first time.

This happened with the FreeBSD releases 10.0, 9.3 and 10.1, while 9.2 still worked perfectly. I have seen reports that the problem also occurs with other main-boards from Intel and Foxconn that use an Intel 965 chipset and maybe even a 975 chipset. These systems are a bit older, but still widely used, especially for experiments, like first time installations of FreeBSD.

You can get the new installation working by booting single user mode from the installation media and typing to the shell: 

/sbin/gpart set -a active adaX
where X is the number of the disk (in my case 0). Alternatively, if you know upfront that the problem will occur, you can also use the same command from the shell optionally started at the very end of the installation process. This command sets the active flag in the PMBR of the disk that some BIOS implementations apparently absolutely need to boot at all from that disk.

There was a PR opened for this issue (see 194359), but it lost focus in some of the later comments and it took quite some time to finally resolve it. The idea of the solution is that systems suffering from the described issue are auto-detected by the installer. The user is then informed by a pop-up during installation and after selecting "ok", the active flag is set automatically by the installer. For my systems this works like a charm from 10.2 onwards. I doubt whether this is also the case for all systems reported to have the problem, but then there is always the above described solution.

As an aside, I have seen the same issue occur with FreeBSD install images that were GPT partitioned. When copied onto a USB stick the system refused to boot from it, displaying the above error message. Here a solution was to type 

/sbin/gpart set -a active da0
immediately after copying the image to USB.

Broken drm-fbsd12.0-kmod package with FreeBSD 12.2

For my (oldish) Core2 Quad (Q6600) systems equipped with AMD Radeon HD-6450 graphics adapters I have been using the drm-fbsd12.0-kmod package from the official package repository. When updating FreeBSD to 12.2 I noticed that loading the kernel module /boot/modules/radeonkms.ko causes the system to panic and hang immediately.

This seems to be a known issue, also for other graphics adapters. There is even a PR filed (see 250193 ), but little progress seems to made there and FreeBSD 12.2 was released with a broken drm-fbsd12.0-kmod package.

For now one remedy is to recompile the package yourself from sources using the ports.

Contact

You can reach me via email as hans@beastielabs.net.

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