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

For some reason I missed the rest of your email when replying earlier. 
Replies to the remainder below.

tl;dr: Solved.  It was the CPU microcode updater

On 2025-01-25 10:48, Edward Sanford Sutton, III wrote:
> On 1/24/25 07:03, list_freebsd@bluerosetech.com wrote:
>> Watching the console, the pre-graphical part goes by too quickly for me
>> to read, but I do catch a big box made of asterisks that looks like the
>> one shown in a forum thread[1] about this issue.  When I get to the
>> graphical boot menu, it has the "Loader needs to be updated" warning
>> just above the autoboot countdown.
> 
>     If you have access to a video camera (even a cell phone with it) then
> you could make a recording that you could load into a player to let you
> stop on the correct frames. Many players let you slow down the video a
> lot and navigate one frame at a time to make it easier to hit that short
> moment or else ffmpeg could turn the video into separate jpg images for
> review.

IPMI console recorder ftw. :)

It's what I thought it was: the big, shouty, asterisk-framed update 
warning.  Loader output otherwise normal.

>     What does your /boot/loader.conf look like? Is your UEFI/BIOS up to
> date? I'm thinking some kind of kernel module incompatibility/bug,
> kernel bug, motherboard UEFI bug, or hardware issue.

It appears there is a problem with the microcode updater 
(intel-20241112).  This makes the 13.4 kernel hang:

# grep '^[^#]' /tmp/BE13.3/boot/loader.conf
cpu_microcode_load="YES"
cpu_microcode_name="/boot/firmware/intel-ucode.bin"
geom_eli_load="YES"
zfs_load="YES"
kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable=0
kern.geom.label.gptid.enable=0

This does not:

# grep '^[^#]' /boot/loader.conf
geom_eli_load="YES"
zfs_load="YES"
kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable=0
kern.geom.label.gptid.enable=0

The hardware is a Xeon E3-1245v6 on a Supermicro X11SSH-LN4F mainboard.