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

[Andriy Gapon]

on 26/05/2011 19:14 Nick Sayer said the following:
> 1. Man pages are not helpful when the system will not boot.

Yeah, if you have only a single system.  Non-hardcopy Handbook/Wiki/etc won't help
you either.

> 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.

Why should it?

> 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.

That's a good idea.

> 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.

Perhaps.  It also shows that you have not been researching and/or asking actively
enough.  If you provide reasonable patches to FreeBSD documentation they will be
welcome.  You can also blog/etc about your experience, so that other people could
pick your knowledge via search engines.

> 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


-- 
Andriy Gapon