rpi4b main-n245392-8423f5d4c12 won't boot due to microsd timeout

[Mark Millard]

On 2021-Mar-12, at 09:38, tech-lists <tech-lists at zyxst.net> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 09:05:52AM -0800, Mark Millard wrote:
> 
>> Then my recommendation would be to not submit
>> anything until you have tested modern materials.
>> Possibly duplicate the media and work on the
>> copy if you want to preserve the content for
>> some reason.
> 
> I just missed this, arg. I'll close
> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=254238 if the issue
> is fixed with a newer image.
> 
>> After you have tried a combination of materials more
>> similar to what someone that works on the problem
>> would be using. Then report on that basis. Such
>> is want I recommend.
> 
> I'll try this and compare. Meanwhile, over the last hr or so I tried refreshing sources and building a new kernel from that. It built and installed fine, but on reboot it showed the same issue.

As reported on the 254238 bugzilla: subtituting the debug
kernel from an official 8423f5d4c12 build onto media
produced from:

FreeBSD-14.0-CURRENT-arm64-aarch64-RPI-20210311-15565e0a217-257277.img.xz

works just fine. The problem looks to be the old vintage
materials on the msdosfs file partition.

> Last year I made notes for myself how to install (current/13 as it was then)
> here: https://cloud.zyxst.net/~john/FreeBSD/current/rpi4b/installing.txt
> 
> Please can you tell me what needs changing?

Unfortunately, RPi4B instructions tend to have a
temporary nature. There are also questions of if
you might want to build your own ports and use
materials from those builds or not. Do you care
between debug builds vs. non-debug builds?
Pre-built vs. your own buildworld buildkernel ?

Currently, a problem is that the debug kernel
disallows USB storage being attached by
panicing. Non-debug kernels do not have the
problem but technically run a risk if
certain memory allocations can not happen
immediately (fairly unlikely?).

Avoiding the debug kernel issue and not building
your own would suggest starting from 13.0-RC2
or later (once available today or tomorrow).
Why? It should finally have basically the same
msdosfs file system content as:

FreeBSD-14.0-CURRENT-arm64-aarch64-RPI-20210311-15565e0a217-257277.img.xz

and also would have a non-debug build. So then
USB storage should appear to work.

We can make instructions for 13.0-RC2 once we
have it to work with (presuming no other
problems block its use).

But the 13.0-RC2 use would be another example of
temporary. Hopefully, any later 13.0 releng-activity
related build for a time would also work as a
non-debug build.


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)