boot hangs at EFI framebuffer information

[AJinNJ]

I have searched (here and wide), and there seem to be some reports of FreeBSD having an issue booting on some MBs...as well as here for TrueNAS Core.

The strange thing is that I upgraded/re-installed this NAS in December with the 12.0 release (previously running FreeNAS 11.x). It has been running fine, but went to perform the upgrade to 12.0-U2 and now it hangs on boot. I have tried to change the Boot Environment back to the 12.0-U1 and that doesn't seem to help somehow.

The system starts loading and gets to:
EFI framebuffer information:
addr, size 0xe0000000, 0xfff0000
dimensions 800 x 600
stride 800
masks 0x00ff0000, 0x0000ff00, 0x000000ff, 0xff000000

And hangs there "forever". I have tried upgrading my system BIOS, but this did not help. I found this bug report, which may be related? https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=209821

Are there any "Options" I can set at boot to get around this? I'm shocked this was running until I tried to upgrade today, because this seems like something that would have been an issue from "day one" if at all.

Please help, my NAS is dead until I can get booted again!

 

[peter.m]

By pure luck - could you go into either your efi shell and run the bootloader from there, or try running directly from EFI setup without rebooting (if your firmware allows you that option)? It may be you're bumping into a bug that i've experienced in vmware where it tries to allocate too much of contiguous memory and fails to init the efi display driver properly.

 

[AJinNJ]

@peter.m I appreciate the response and ideas...

I'm in the process of trying a manual upgrade (i.e. with a USB stick) from 12.0-U1 to 12.0-U1.1, and while that is taking some time to complete, it DOES seem to be running. When I tried to perform a similar upgrade with the USB stick loaded with the 12-U2 ISO, it failed at the same point as above, so I have some hope this will complete successfully.

I tried going back to the release notes to see if they had upgraded the bootloader and/or kernel with the U2 release, but I couldn't see anything specific. However, my latest findings seem to indicate that this is a bug in the U2 release for some motherboards/UEFI. I can't be sure yet (if ever), but I will certainly reply-back if my "upgrade" to U1.1 is successful.

My theory is that the bootloader - or some portion of the install - was upgraded to the U2 software in my initial attempt (from the web app).

TBH, I'm not sure how to get to the efi shell in my ASUS MB to even try your suggestion, as much as I would like to.

EDIT: Did not work. Same results installing the U1.1. Happy to test your theory if you can post some links to details. BTW: If it's a display driver...would it help if I threw an old graphics card in there? It's using the built-in/mobo one right now.

 

[peter.m]

I'm not sure how to get to the efi shell in my ASUS MB to even try your suggestion, as much as I would like to.

Unfortunately this is highly board dependent - some boards have one built in, some have a way to run one from disk, some don't offer that option at all. If you're not seeing a "Run EFI Shell" in your firmware setup then you're probably in the later category. There is a way to run it form usb, but it's way outside the scope of this forum post :(

You could google around for "run efi shell from usb", then do just that. once you're in the shell, you'll need to find the efi bootloader for truenas and run that (something like fs0:\EFI\boot\bootx64.efi, but you'll need to make sure fs0 is the drive with truenas on it)

BTW: If it's a display driver...would it help if I threw an old graphics card in there? It's using the built-in/mobo one right now.

Unfortunately no, doesn't work that way :(

 

[AJinNJ]

OK, let's say I can get to a efi shell...are there certain params to pass to the boot.efi exe? I assume I'm trying to lower that efi_staging_size with a param or something like that?

Thanks again.

 

[peter.m]

No. The idea is that the efi shell will initialize the efi video driver, and the freebsd bootloader won't have to. That's how it works on vmware. This post explains it https://communities.vmware.com/t5/V...-Fusion-12/m-p/2284864/highlight/true#M136532

 

[AJinNJ]

OK, your research goes along with my theory about why this is happening. Now, is it possible to swap-out the bootloader with a 12.3 or backwards one that has the EFR_STAGING_SIZE back at 64, at least temporarily and/or to test it?

(Still looking at shell options, but I don't think there's one built-in, which means it's bigger than a breadbox.)

 

[peter.m]

OK, your research goes along with my theory about why this is happening. Now, is it possible to swap-out the bootloader with a 12.3 or backwards one that has the EFR_STAGING_SIZE back at 64, at least temporarily and/or to test it?

(Still looking at shell options, but I don't think there's one built-in, which means it's bigger than a breadbox.)

I honestly don't know, I'm pretty new to FreeBSD myself, and only got interested because of the link to TrueNAS Scale. Maybe someone else can answer that