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

[Nick Sayer]

On May 26, 2011, at 9:25 AM, Andriy Gapon wrote:

> 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?

Did you not read the last sentence there, sparky?

> 
>> 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.

I love it. I couldn't find the answer, so it's clearly my fault.

>  If you provide reasonable patches to FreeBSD documentation they will be
> welcome.

I can't document it if I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FRIGGING ANSWER IS!

>  You can also blog/etc about your experience, so that other people could
> pick your knowledge via search engines.

In fact, I gave a talk at BSDCan about my experience. You'll see a reference to this PR on the BSDCan site.

> 
>> 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