Re: Can't upgrade 13.3->13.4, kernel hangs at launch

On 2025-01-25 10:48, Edward Sanford Sutton, III wrote:
> On 1/24/25 07:03, list_freebsd@bluerosetech.com wrote:
>> I have a server currently running 13.3.  I'm unable to upgrade it to
>> 13.4 because when I try to boot the upgraded boot environment, the
>> loader hangs where it would normally launch the kernel.  The graphical
>> boot menu shows the "Loader needs to be updated" warning despite using
>> the loader.efi from 13.4.
> 
>     If I recall, there was a false alert giving that message which last I
> checked had not been added to errata or similar areas.

Ya I'm fairly confident at this point the update warning is not related 
to the issue I'm facing.  Subject line updated accordingly.


> If nothing has
> changed and you are using ZFS, you should make sure the loader is
> upgraded before doing a `zpool upgrade` and then just ignore the message.
>     The ZFS boot issue people have doesn't occur until there is an
> upgrade performed to the pool and no upgrade done to the loader;

I haven't upgraded the pool or enabled any feature flags


> the
> older loader doesn't understand the newer pool features so will refuse
> to read from it to avoid misunderstanding it. Both upgrades are only
> performed manually and not by freebsd-update so booting isn't broken
> from that unless you did that upgrade yourself. Boot environments do not
> protect a user from this mistake; either you had to create a whole pool
> checkpoint that you could roll back or update the boot loader to be able
> to fix that issue without having to rebuild the pool from scratch.

If it was an issue with the loader not supporting the pool 
version/features, then it would also fail to boot when Boot Environments 
fell back to the 13.3 BE, no?  Likewise, the older loader that was there 
before would also fail to boot 13.3?


>     The installer can setup both a EFI and older MBR boot loaders on the
> same disk. If your configuration had that and you only upgraded one but
> it isn't being used for whatever reason then you would be unexpectedly
> on an older loader. Review `gpart show` to look for for "efi" and
> "freebsd-boot" to know if you have UEFI and MBR booting setup on that disk.

# gpart show nvd0 nvd1
=>        40  1000215136  nvd0  GPT  (477G)
           40      204800     2  efi  (100M)
       204840     3989464        - free -  (1.9G)
      4194304   996020224     1  freebsd-zfs  (475G)
   1000214528         648        - free -  (324K)

=>        40  1000215136  nvd1  GPT  (477G)
           40      204800     2  efi  (100M)
       204840     3989464        - free -  (1.9G)
      4194304   996020224     1  freebsd-zfs  (475G)
   1000214528         648        - free -  (324K)