Consistency of pkg db on UFS

[Ali Abdallah]

Hello,

I've came across the following issues on a freshly installed system with
a UFS SU+j root partition.

# pkg install -y some_package
The package management tool is not yet installed on your system.
Do you want to fetch and install it now? [y/N]: y
# kldload SOME_MODULE
-> crash happens here (due to drm for example)

On next boot any attempt to use pkg results in the following message:

# pkg install nano
The package management tool is not yet installed on your system.
Do you want to fetch and install it now? [y/N]: y
Bootstrapping pkg from
pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:12:amd64/quarterly, please wait...
Verifying signature with trusted certificate
pkg.freebsd.org.2013102301... done
Installing pkg-1.15.10...
the most recent version of pkg-1.15.10 is already installed

It seems that /var/db/pkg/local.sqlite contains entry for the installed
packages, but those packages didn't make it to the filesystem.

Is this because the db is fsynced while the actual package data is not?

The issue is very easy to reproduce (on a VM for instance).
(I was not able to reproduce on a ZFS root filesystem).

Regards,
Ali