boot loader blank screen

[Toomas Soome]

> On 4. Jan 2021, at 18:22, John Kennedy <warlock at phouka.net> wrote:
> 
> This is a little weird.
> 
> Somewhere between 13.0-g2ff66a915526 (Dec 30th) and -gd03fd8ede2c4 (Dec 29th),
> I've lost the screen in the boot loader.  This is really weird because I
> didn't update the boot loader (in quite a while, actually), but I suppose it
> might drag some stuff off of the disk and misbehave.
> 
> But the system boots, presumably after the countdown that I can't see, I just
> have to SSH in from a different machine to tweak things.  Just no screen at
> all past the GELI encrypted disk password prompt (and some usual noise as
> it complains about some padding that I've seen forever).
> 
> I used to just upgrade the boot loader around ZFS upgrades, and I haven't
> done that since OpenZFS got merged.  I just got overly conservative there
> and may have missed the "all clear" for all combinations of ZFS and the
> bootloader recognizing them.
> 
> The git logs in /usr/src aren't time-sequential, so maybe I shouldn't trust
> those dates above (I pulled it ~Jan 3rd and let it compile overnight), but
> I'm going to repull all the sources and recompile, just in case.  I might
> have initiall pulled it during the git conversion and maybe it is confused.
> 

hi!

Yes, it is known defect, and I’m searching for cause; the issue is with /boot/loader and BIOS text mode (unfortunately I have the usual ‘but it is working for me’ case). For workaround, you can try to either: 1 (blind) press esc to get out of boot menu, then enter: vbe on; another option is to add hw.vga.textmode=“0” to loader.conf.

Sorry for confusion,
toomas