Loader broken in Head?

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday 31 October 2007 09:37:48 pm Mike Pritchard wrote:
> > On Friday 26 October 2007 08:03:21 pm Red Neck wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Within the last day (26/10/07) I've built and installed the sources
> >  from CVS
> > Head only to find the stage 3 boot loader, /boot/loader, not working.
> >   I'm
> > using a Mac Pro with 3 internal hard drives.  On one hard disk I have
> > FreeBSD amd64 installed, occupying the entire disk (MBR).  Using the
>  sources
> > from Head, loader just freezes after displaying its initial messages
>  with a
> > constantly spinning cursor.  To access the system I have to revert to
>  using
> > an older loader such as 6.2 release's.  I have attached my make and
>  kernel
> > config.
> 
> I was seeing a similar problem.  Booting from a floppy disk twice would
> probably be faster than booting off the hard disk.  I had just done
> a makeworld, and updated the boot blocks on the disk (it previously had
> a pretty old install on it).  But the system would eventually boot, and 
> not hang up.  I noticed that Red Necks boot loader build date was the 
> same as the version I was having problems with.
> 
> Fortunately, I have a 2nd HD in the machine with a 7.0 install,
> and installed the boot blocks from that HD to the one I was having
> problems with, and copied over /boot/loader from that HD.
> No more problems.  System boots as fast as ever.
> 
> So yes, I think there is something wrong with the current loader.
> 
> With the slow boot, once the system is up and running, the disks
> are running at normal speeds (checked with iozone & bonnie).

Did you get the latest loader?  For example, do you have this fix which might 
result in significantly slower disk I/O since w/o it every disk I/O is 
attempted 3 times with 2 drive resets in between:

jhb         2007-10-25 16:53:35 UTC

  FreeBSD src repository

  Modified files:
    sys/boot/i386/libi386 biosdisk.c 
  Log:
  Break out of the I/O retry loop as soon as an I/O operation succeeds rather
  than always retrying operations three times.
  
  Submitted by:   nyan
  
  Revision  Changes    Path
  1.53      +2 -0      src/sys/boot/i386/libi386/biosdisk.c

-- 
John Baldwin