The system boots from a geli encrypted zfs raid1z on 4 da disks, I'm later added two sata disks, geli encrypted with the same passphrase. Systems asks for the passphrase after bios boot and the kernel loads. In the middle of the kernel boot I get asked 2nd time for the passphrase to mount the additional 2 disks. Setting kern.geom.eli.passphrase in the loader walks around this problem and the additional disks are successfully decrypted. This issue exists only on BIOS, EFI works. see here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/geli-zfs.83316/#post-546692 Holm