Problems booting into ZFS on recent stable/9

[Chris Ross]

On Mon Jul 1 19:51:45 UTC 2013, Gary Palmer <gpalmer at freebsd.org>  wrote:
> What is the interface that the disk(s) that ZFS are on?  If it's the
> AcerLabs ATA controller, then there are no disks found.  There is an
> earlier ATA bus (at a guess from the fact ata2 and ata3 are shown above),
> however I don't see any disks detected.  Normally ATA and SCSI/SAS disks
> are probed asynchronously near the end of the boot and that appears
> to be missing

  Right you are.  That's likely the core of the problem, then.  On my netboot of
an older kernel, I see more at the end as you describe:

atapci0: <AcerLabs M5229 UDMA66 controller> port 0x10200-0x10207,0x10218-0x1021b,0x10210-0x10217,0x10208-0x1020b,0x10220-0x1022f at device 13.0 on pci0
atapci0: using PIO transfers above 137GB as workaround for 48bit DMA access bug, expect reduced performance
ata2: <ATA channel> at channel 0 on atapci0
ata3: <ATA channel> at channel 1 on atapci0
nexus0: <syscons> type unknown (no driver attached)
rtc0: <Real-Time Clock> at port 0x70-0x71 on isa0
uart0: <16550 or compatible> at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 43 on isa0
uart0: console (9600,n,8,1)
uart1: <16550 or compatible> at port 0x2e8-0x2ef irq 43 on isa0
ZFS NOTICE: Prefetch is disabled by default if less than 4GB of RAM is present;
            to enable, add "vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=0" to /boot/loader.conf.
ZFS filesystem version: 5
ZFS storage pool version: features support (5000)
Timecounter "tick" frequency 500000000 Hz quality 1000
Event timer "tick" frequency 500000000 Hz quality 1000
Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec
usbus0: 12Mbps Full Speed USB v1.0
ugen0.1: <AcerLabs> at usbus0
uhub0: <AcerLabs OHCI root HUB, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1> on usbus0
ada0 at ata2 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
ada0: <Maxtor 5A320J0 RAM51VV0> ATA-7 device
ada0: 66.700MB/s transfers (UDMA4, PIO 8192bytesuhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered)
ada0: 308921MB (632672208 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada0: Previously was known as ad0
ada1 at ata3 bus 0 scbus1 target 0 lun 0
ada1: <Maxtor 5A320J0 RAM51VV0> ATA-7 device
ada1: 66.700MB/s transfers (UDMA4, PIO 8192bytes)
ada1: 308921MB (632672208 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada1: Previously was known as ad1
GEOM_MIRROR: Device mirror/gswap launched (2/2).
Trying to mount root from nfs: []...
dc0: link state changed to UP

  Maybe I messed something up in the kernel I was building.  Let me drop back to a GENERIC
from the same stable/9 and see if that will boot.  I just have to figure out how to get it onto the
disks.  :-)

             - Chris