Re: FreeBSD 15 snapshot with UFS Flash

On 7/21/25 13:20, Warner Losh wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> Recently, I bought a system with 256 of UFS flash (UFS here is
> Universal Flash Storage, a system that presents flash to the host as a
> SCSI device).  I grabbed the latest snapshot (15.0 20250718) and put
> it on a USB stick. It just worked, though there's a couple of rough
> edges I'll document here.
> 
> To boot and install, I needed disable SECURE BOOT so I wouldn't boot
> into windows. I did that by pressing and holding <DEL> as the system
> booted and disabling in the Security section. I had a Minisforum S-100
> system with 256GB
> (https://refurbished.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-s100-refurbished
> may have the 128GB version). Once I disabled secure boot, I selected
> the USB stick to boot. FreeBSD came right up.
> 
> However, the ufshci library isn't in the GENERIC kernel yet, and
> devmatch didn't automatically load it for me. So I had to stop at the
> first prompt to get a shell, 'kldload ufshci' and then 'gpart destroy
> -F da1' to remove the windows install.  I then did a normal ZFS guided
> install.
> 
> Once I got done with all that, I had to edit /boot/loader.confg to add
> 'ufshci_load=YES' at the end before I rebooted. And my system was
> good. If you forget, you can load /boot/kernel/kernel,
> /boot/kernel/zfs.ko and /boot/kernel/ufshci.ko at the command prompt
> in the loader.
> 
> This was all way less pain than I'd prepared for. The system is
> decently fast, but nowhere near as fast as my server machines. I've
> not yet tried to put a X11 on it, since I still need it for UFS
> testing for future submissions and to fix a couple of rough edges for
> a few things I've done in CAM before 15.0 goes out the door.

I highly recommend adding sysutils/cpu-microcode-intel (and the needed 
config tweaks) to mitigate various page-table-related bugs in these CPUs,

	Michael