amd64/160801: zfsboot on 8.2-RELEASE fails to boot from root-on-zfs in MBR slice

[Johannes Totz]

On 19/09/2011 15:30, Camillo Särs wrote:
> The following reply was made to PR kern/160801; it has been noted by GNATS.
> 
> From: =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Camillo_S=E4rs?= <ged at iki.fi>
> To: John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org>
> Cc: freebsd-amd64 at freebsd.org, freebsd-gnats-submit at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: amd64/160801: zfsboot on 8.2-RELEASE fails to boot from root-on-zfs
>  in MBR slice
> Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:07:26 +0300
> 
>  Hi,
>  
>  On 2011-09-19 15:02, John Baldwin wrote:
>  >> Install zfsboot from 9.0-BETA2, where the problem is fixed.
>  > 
>  > Can you test 8.2-stable?  The various fixes made to zfsboot in 9 were merged 
>  > to 8 after 8.2-release.
>  
>  Unfortunately fixing this issue by installing zfsboot from 9.0-BETA2 was
>  a surprising amount of work, because of an incompatibility between the
>  9.0 USB installer GPT and the BIOS on this system.  It took quite a
>  while to recognize the root cause for that one.  I simply cannot boot
>  the system in question with the GPT pmbr used on the memstick of 9.0.
>  The BIOS locks completely.

I have a similar issue (with an HP Proliant microserver). GPT on USB
simply wont boot, but GPT on HDD is fine.

However, I followed http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/ZFSBootPartition
to set up an MBR on my boot-usb-stick and it worked fine.
This was using a version of 8-stable of around 5th Sept 2011 (dont have
svn rev at hand).

>  I am very reluctant to risk breaking my currently running system, the
>  previous boot failure caused almost two weeks of downtime.
>  
>  Does the 8.2-stable memstick image still use MBR?  If so, I could
>  conceivably try to copy the 9.0 zfsboot version to the 8.2-stable
>  memstick and test both.
>  
>  Regards,
>  Camillo
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