Post 'svn up .' to Revision: 266585 for 9.2; failure to mount root

[Joe Altman]

On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 12:18:33AM -0500, CyberLeo Kitsana wrote:
>
> 
> Were your 'ad' aliases disabled in this new build? I just checked, and
> my 9.2 and 10.0 boxen have them by default; but they can be turned off.

If they were disabled, I did not do so. Additionally, I don't have a
clear idea what disabling means. So a question: is this something that
is done for some reason?

> 
> I would say to type ? at the mountroot prompt, but...
> 
> > Then my keyboard fails, so I need to warm reset the machine.
> 
> ...which means you can't really see what devices are available.

I have tried to look at the issue, and find in dmesg for GENERIC:

ada0: Previously was known as ad4
ada1: Previously was known as ad8

When I look at messages, this first occurs after the upgrade in the
subject line.

glabel list shows this:

joe on whisperer /var/log $: glabel list -a
Geom name: ada1s1
Providers:
1. Name: ufsid/4ded07edcfa105b8
   Mediasize: 640134996480 (596G)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Stripesize: 0
   Stripeoffset: 32256
   Mode: r0w0e0
   secoffset: 0
   offset: 0
   seclength: 1250263665
   length: 640134996480
   index: 0
Consumers:
1. Name: ada1s1
   Mediasize: 640134996480 (596G)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Stripesize: 0
   Stripeoffset: 32256
   Mode: r0w0e0

Which shows the absence of ada0...

> Since you're using GENERIC, can you extract a fresh kernel from the
> distribution and see if that exhibits similar behaviour, just to narrow
> down a possible intermittent hardware issue?

Not sure what this means.

> Another thing you might try is to switch the root mount in fstab or
> loader.conf to using a glabel device, like /dev/ufs/<label> or
> /dev/ufsid/<hex-id>, and see if that works where the ad alias failed.

I was hoping to find out why ada4 vanished. My BIOS has not changed in
something like a half-decade. AFAICT (and this is just a guess)
something in the FreeBSD source changed and affects only me; or I have
corrupted or odd source. I'm tending to think that a removal of all
source and a fresh checkout is in order. 

One last point: trying to rule out an intermittent hardware issue, I
built WHISPERER a second and third time. Both not only failed to boot
with the error reported, kernel.old was not installed for either
attempt.

Regards,

Joe Altman