Question about 'gptzfsboot'

[Ian Lepore]

On Sun, 2019-04-28 at 19:29 -0400, Thomas Laus wrote:
> On 2019-04-28 08:07, Ronald Klop wrote:
> > 
> > Is this the same as this?
> > https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=144234
> > 
> 
> The messages are similar.  The boot process will normally proceed on
> the
> second or third attempt.  On some days, I don't see this message
> appear
> and my laptops boot normally.  I don't think that this problem is
> hardware related.  One laptop is a Compaq Pavilion with an AMD Turion
> CPU and the other is a Dell Inspiron with an Intel Core2 Duo
> CPU.  One
> hard drive is mechanical and the other is a SSD.  I have swapped hard
> drives between the two laptops and the issue still shows up on
> occasion
> with each PC.  I have never seen this issue on any of my desktop
> computers.  Everything is running FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT r346544
> GENERIC-NODEBUG at the moment.  The thread in the bug report also
> shows
> a smaller LBA number, mine is LBA 18446744072709551608 and much
> further
> in geometry than most of the reported issues.  I have seen this issue
> since FreeBSD 12 was CURRENT.  Since the boot process will work on a
> second or third boot attempt, it is not a show stopper for me.
> 
> Tom
> 

If you're using gptzfsboot, I guess you're using zfs?  I just fixed a
problem with probing disks for zfs volumes a few days ago (r346675). 
There is even some small chance it fixes this problem, because one of
the things I noticed was that in one of the disk structures in loader,
the "slice offset" value was sometimes a bit random-looking, like it
was being initialized with whatever garbage was laying around in
memory.  It actually makes some sense that the "garbage" might be
different between a firstboot after power-on and a reboot.

So all in all, it wouldn't hurt to update both gptzfsboot and loader
(gpart bootcode -b and -p) to see if there's a fix lurking in my zfs
probe changes.

-- Ian