loader(8) readin failed on 7.2R and later including 8.0R

[John Baldwin]

On Thursday 03 December 2009 5:29:13 am Hiroki Sato wrote:
> John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote
>   in <200912020948.05698.jhb at freebsd.org>:
> 
> jh> On Tuesday 01 December 2009 12:13:39 pm Hiroki Sato wrote:
> jh> >  While the "load" command seemed to finish, the box got stuck just
> jh> >  after entering "boot" command.
> jh> >
> jh> >  Curious to say, I have got this symptom only on a specific box in
> jh> >  more than ten different boxes I upgraded so far; it is based on an
> jh> >  old motherboard Supermicro P4DPE[*].
> jh> >
> jh> >  [*] 
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/E7500/P4DPE.cfm
> jh> >
> jh> >  Any workaround?  Booting from release CDROMs (7.2R and 8.0R) also
> jh> >  fail.  On the box "7.1R" or "7.1R's loader + 7.2R kernel" worked
> jh> >  fine.  It is possible something in changes of loader(8) between 7.1R
> jh> >  and 7.2R is the cause, but I am still not sure what it is...
> jh>
> jh> It may be related to the loader switching to using memory > 1MB for its
> jh> malloc().  Maybe try building the loader with 
'LOADER_NO_GPT_SUPPORT=yes' in
> jh> /etc/src.conf?
> 
>  Thanks, a recompiled loader with LOADER_NO_GPT_SUPPORT=yes' displayed
>  "elf32_loadimage: could not read symbols - skipped!" for 8.0R kernel.
>  This is the same as 7.1R's loader + 8.0R kernel case.

Can you get the output of 'smap' from the loader?  Is the 8.0 kernel bigger 
than the 7.x kernel?  If so, can you try trimming the 8.0 kernel a bit to see 
if that changes things?

-- 
John Baldwin