kern/153804: boot from zfs kernel.old recovery undocumented/impossible

[Nick Sayer]

1. Man pages are not helpful when the system will not boot. 

2. The page in question does not mention the correct type argument for the zpool.cache (nor that the type is not material). Not that it necessarily should, but in either case, loader(8) is not sufficient. 

3. Perhaps it would be particularly helpful to print some kind of message as to WHY the system failed to mount root - that the zpool.cache file wasn't loaded. That message would be good google fodder to help folks with unbootable systems get back up and running. 

All I know is that I have been without an answer as to how to recover between January and a few days ago. That suggests to me the existence of a documentation gap. 

On May 26, 2011, at 8:20 AM, Andriy Gapon <avg at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> on 26/05/2011 17:40 Nick Sayer said the following:
>> The following reply was made to PR kern/153804; it has been noted by GNATS.
>> 
>> From: Nick Sayer <nsayer at kfu.com>
>> To: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org
>> Cc:  
>> Subject: Re: kern/153804: boot from zfs kernel.old recovery undocumented/impossible
>> Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 07:31:13 -0700
>> 
>> Before this gets closed, is someone going to maybe add this to some =
>> documentation somewhere? This ought to go in the handbook at the very =
>> least.
> 
> Which part exactly?
> IMO, loader(8) should be sufficient.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Andriy Gapon