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Date:      Tue, 10 Dec 2019 17:08:58 +0100
From:      Mark Martinec <Mark.Martinec+freebsd@ijs.si>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Cc:        Marc Branchaud <marcnarc@gmail.com>
Subject:   Re: Boot loader stuck after first stage upgrading 11.2 to 12.0-RC2
Message-ID:  <e795a9731d83a0df7d065117048df5b6@ijs.si>
In-Reply-To: <f599acfb-20f7-fc53-9753-fcd37a923e8e@gmail.com>
References:  <22f5b92a09ea4d62ac3feb74457067f7@ijs.si> <5EEBAFC0-4FA3-4219-A918-7376F4223656@me.com> <f2737ffb236d39761767aa10a603c084@ijs.si> <0F5FCC70-EADB-4F9E-A391-F1A73BE5608F@me.com> <dc762bdf408c92daae826425fdba98d9@ijs.si> <B3C7194D-93B8-406B-9E8E-BA55D49D657A@me.com> <1543954753.1860.243.camel@freebsd.org> <EC8DD049-8BBE-4E96-A68B-A2846CED00BA@me.com> <53ceda24-fa1b-8546-3511-bd500b440dfe@digiware.nl> <4c4019102b63054f8de93324dba0e776@ijs.si> <f599acfb-20f7-fc53-9753-fcd37a923e8e@gmail.com>

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2019-12-10 16:35, Marc Branchaud wrote:

> On 2019-12-10 9:18 a.m., Mark Martinec wrote:
>> Commenting on a thread from 2018-12 and from 2019-09-20, with my 
>> solution
>> to the boot problem at the end, in case anyone is still interested.
> 
> Thank you very much for this.  A couple of questions:
> 
> (1) Why do you say "raw devices for historical reasons"?  Glancing
> through the zpool man page and the Handbook, I see nothing
> recommending or requiring GPT partitions.

Apparently using raw devices for zpool is now discouraged,
although I don't think it has ever become officially unsupported.


> (2) Just to be 100% clear, my 11.3 non-root zpool looks like this:
>         NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
>         storage     ONLINE       0     0     0
>           raidz2-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
>             ada2    ONLINE       0     0     0
>             ada3    ONLINE       0     0     0
>             ada4    ONLINE       0     0     0
>             ada5    ONLINE       0     0     0
>             ada6    ONLINE       0     0     0
>             ada7    ONLINE       0     0     0
> 
> So this is using raw devices.  Are you saying that if I upgrade this
> machine to 12 that it won't be able to boot?

It is possible it won't boot under 12, although not necessary.

Try booting from a 12.0 (or 12.0) memory stick - it that boots,
it is probably a safe bet that it will survive an upgrade.

Of the bunch of machines that I have upgraded from 11.2 to 12,
only three failed to boot under 12.0 loader. There were a couple
of others which upgraded and booted fine even though they
had a zfs pool on raw devices. I never had a problem of
booting on hosts that had zfs pool on a gpt partition.

So it's a lottery: a few raw devices in a zpool seem to do fine,
while many raw devices in a zpool is asking for trouble
under 12.0 and later.

   Mark



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