I started reinstalling 9.0-RELEASE on a handful of test boxes at iXsystems, and the problem I've run into is that /dev/iso9660/FREEBSD_INSTALL doesn't exist as the IPMI-provided virtual CD drive (/dev/cd1) isn't attached to the system yet. If I use ? at the panic screen and wait long enough, eventually the device and the label will appear, but not until then. That being said I've also seen the issue with a handful of physical media drives as well with earlier 9.0 BETAs and RCs. This issue no doubt also will occur with some USB media, given past experience with sysinstall. Fix: There are a couple ways to either resolve or work around this issue. 1. Set kern.cam.boot_delay to 20 seconds on the install media. This should quickly hack around the problem. 2. Rewrite the installer to instead bootstrap from an mfsroot, like sysinstall, then 'pivot' the root over to the CD, USB, etc media once it becomes available (a dumb while loop with a timeout should suffice). A detection mechanism for PXE booters should probably be added as a special case as I'm sure someday someone will hack the 9.0+ media to PXE boot. 3. Some other ata/cam fix could probably be applied to fix the overall general case, but I'm not sure what the solution might be... How-To-Repeat: 1. Get access to the IPMI controller on a Supermicro box that's x86_64 capable. 2. Mount the 9.0-RELEASE-amd64 image via the virtual media manager. 3. Boot from the virtual CD drive.
Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-bugs->freebsd-sysinstall Over to maintainer(s).
Still an issue with 9.3/10.2, but with i386 VMs with VMware Fusion now :(... I'm more convinced that this is an issue that should be solved via ata_cam and changing the SYSINITs a bit so all of the devices are properly quiesced before it tries to run mountroot.
batch change: For bugs that match the following - Status Is In progress AND - Untouched since 2018-01-01. AND - Affects Base System OR Documentation DO: Reset to open status. Note: I did a quick pass but if you are getting this email it might be worthwhile to double check to see if this bug ought to be closed.