Do you guys have screenshots of the issue? I'd like to repro this and fix it before 8.0.3-RELEASE.
FWIW, setting autoboot_delay to 10 in the loaders in the GUI worked, so loaders do indeed work like I tested before (quotes vs non-quotes shouldn't matter -- if it does then it's a FreeBSD bug that needs to be fixed)... Two things to keep in mind with sysctls/tunables:
1. Developers could be inconsistent with the naming scheme for tunables/sysctls if they weren't very 'regimented' when they were originally designing the knobs. In particular, code in the kernel that is defined with one of the SYSCTL_* macros with one of the two flags:
Code:
CTLFLAG_TUN Also declare a system tunable with the same name to ini-
tialize this variable.
CTLFLAG_RDTUN Also declare a system tunable with the same name to ini-
tialize this variable; however, the run-time variable is
read-only.
have a 1:1 sysctl/tunable mapping. There are also some knobs values where the developer chose consistent names and things just work because the names are consistent. There are however, some knobs that have inconsistent names between the sysctl and the tunable (hw.bce/hw.mfi I'm looking at you ;)..).
2. If the developer of the driver/knob things you're doing something unwise, then they'll override your provided values (the VMEM subsystems and ZFS are prime examples).