Re: ALPHA-3 diskless + bhyve issues

On Thu, Oct 9, 2025 at 11:15 PM Daniel Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il> wrote:
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> On 10 Oct 2025, at 00:33, Bjoern A. Zeeb <bzeeb-lists@lists.zabbadoz.net> wrote:
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> On Tue, 23 Sep 2025, Daniel Braniss wrote:
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> So after many years, I tried to install instead of upgrading,
> and after much fiddling (if anyone is interested I can write how I did i) I got it to
> install, now here is my problem:
> when the the local disk was empty, loader.efi is called (this via dhcp) and it boots diskless,
> but now that the disk is populated, it boots from it.
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> Q: how can I have it boot diskless again?
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> I haven't seen an answer.  Have you tried the freebsd-virtualization list?
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> I assume you could interrupt the boot process if fast enough (but it's the blink of an eye);
> so you'll most likely be more successful putting a startup.nsh and possibly an EFI shell in the EFI System Partition (ESP) and script it?  Could be the bhyve firmware brings the efi shell along already?
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> /bz
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> --
> Bjoern A. Zeeb                                                     r15:7
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> hi,
> no answer yet, but after some experimenting:
> boots diskless:
> if no local disk - dah
> if local disk and no EFI partition
> if local disk has the above but no valid root partition
> and finally if root partition and efi but no bootx64.efi ( i just move it to bootx64.efix)
Can you try the case where there is a non-bootable ZFS partition?

When I have a non-bootable ZFS partition with a zpool in it, bhyve decides that
is the root and fails to boot the UFS root fs. I need to:

currdev=disk0s1
boot

to get it to boot.

I don't know if this is what you might be seeing? rick

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> thanks,
> danny
> ps: i guess i forgot to mention that the host is running in bhyve (14.3)
> pass: it’s now alpha-5
>