[Bug 229972] 11.2-RELEASE kernel wont boot with zfs mirror root

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https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=229972

--- Comment #4 from Patrick Mackinlay <freebsd.68fba at nospam.spacesurfer.com> ---
Yesterday I had some time to investigate this further and believe I have found
the problem (at least for me).

I created a bhyve vm and installed a simple vanilla FreeBSD 11.1 instance with
a single root ZFS pool (nothing special, single partition, no raid or mirror).
I then used freebsd-update to bring it up to the latests 11.1 patch level, this
booted fine. After that I used freebsd-update to go to 11.2. No problems.

My main desktop (the one that failed the upgrade) has two ZFS pools, a mirror
for the base OS and a raidz2 pool (on geli partitions) for my data. I copied
the two disks I use for my image partition onto two old spare disks. The zfs
partitions I copied using the zfs send/receive functionality. The boot
partitions I created from scratch and used the boot code (and partcode) from my
11.2 vm install. This is when I noticed that the gptzfsboot code from 11.2 is
different from the 11.1 gptzfsboot code. After a few changes to the vm copies
(rc.conf had to be modified for the different network, loader.conf
vfs.root.mountfrom had to be changed ...). I booted the copy in my vm. I
followed the  freebsd-update process, but note that my install has a custom
kernel, so after the final "freebsd-update install" used the old 11.1 kernel. I
then built my kernel from source and rebooted the vm. All went well, no issues.

So there are 2 things I did different for the true upgrade and the vm upgrade.
1. I used the latest gptzfsboot code in the vm upgrade
2. I built the custom kernel after the 11.2 base upgrade in the vm. For the non
vm I build the new kernel before the base upgrade and then installed it after
the base upgrade

One of those two steps fixed the problem. I assume it was using the latest
gptzfsboot code that fixed the issue (I always build the new kernel with the
old code base (new src) and I have never had problems in the past).

So as far as I am concerned this issue is fixed, although it would be nicer if
FreeBSD were a bit more forgiving when you get it wrong. Also I did not see any
note about the gptzfsboot code changing in the UPDATING file.

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