I tried to boot 11.2-BETA1 on a BeagleBone Black that had been running 11.1-RELEASE. It didn't boot, falling back to the EMMC (which isn't bootable, a different problem). I was also unable to boot the snapshot from 12/20. I see that the boot partition has different contents: 11.1-RELEASE: MLO u-boot.img ubldr ubldr.bin 11.2-BETA1: MLO boot.scr u-boot.img ubldr.bin fwiw, when trying to boot the failing versions, I get a stream of 'C' characters on the serial console, which I also get when trying to boot from EMMC.
I have an ~old snapshot (FreeBSD-12.0-CURRENT-arm-armv7-BEAGLEBONE-20180426-r333017.img) which works. gpart show mmcsd0 => 63 31116225 mmcsd0 MBR (15G) 63 961 - free - (481K) 1024 4096 1 !12 [active] (2.0M) 5120 6286336 2 freebsd (3.0G) 6291456 24824832 - free - (12G) The current snapshot (FreeBSD-12.0-CURRENT-arm-armv7-BEAGLEBONE-20180514-r333606.img): gpart show mmcsd0 => 63 31116225 mmcsd0 MBR (15G) 63 1008 - free - (504K) 1071 83916 1 !12 [active] (41M) 84987 6206445 2 freebsd (3.0G) 6291432 24824856 - free - (12G) Reformating the msdos partition to FAT16 and copy the old content make it boot. FAT12 that big could be the problem. Maybe it's time to switch to fat16. Kernel panic early (panic: kobj_class_compile: out of memory) which is a other issue.
Same trick did make 11.2-PRERELEASE boot
(In reply to Emmanuel Vadot from comment #1) From a quick look at Fat12 and Fat16 Eugene is correct, the maximum size of a fat12 file system based on 4k clusters would be 16MB, and on 8k clusters would be 32MB. We can either shrink to <32MB, and retain Fat12 format, or change to fat16. I would strongly suggest the change to fat16. Also there should of been an error when this partition was formatted during the build process flagging that it could not be formatted to its capacity (a seperate bug and fix should be done for this issue)
(In reply to Rodney W. Grimes from comment #3) Grr.. Sorry Eugene and Emmanuel, I mixed your names!
A commit references this bug: Author: manu Date: Thu May 17 16:21:13 UTC 2018 New revision: 333737 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/333737 Log: release: arm: Format FAT partition as FAT16 r332674 raised the size of the FAT partition from 2MB to 41MB for some boards. But we format them in FAT12 and this size appears to be to big for FAT12 and some SoC bootrom cannot cope with that. Format the msdosfs partition as FAT16, PR: 228285 MFC after: soon Changes: head/release/arm/BEAGLEBONE.conf head/release/arm/GUMSTIX.conf head/release/arm/PANDABOARD.conf
A commit references this bug: Author: manu Date: Thu May 17 17:00:08 UTC 2018 New revision: 333739 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/333739 Log: MFC r333737: release: arm: Format FAT partition as FAT16 r332674 raised the size of the FAT partition from 2MB to 41MB for some boards. But we format them in FAT12 and this size appears to be to big for FAT12 and some SoC bootrom cannot cope with that. Format the msdosfs partition as FAT16, PR: 228285 Approved by: re (marius) Changes: _U stable/11/ stable/11/release/arm/BEAGLEBONE.conf stable/11/release/arm/GUMSTIX.conf stable/11/release/arm/PANDABOARD.conf
11.2-BETA2 boots fine for me.
Thanks for confirming.