Startup fails every other startup.

[Steven McKelvey]

I am currently running FreeNAS-9.1.1-RELEASE-x64.
Freenas is running from a USB3 SSD.
I am seeing a repeatable behavior that if I shutdown/restart Freenas, it fails to start, but only every *other* restart. It locks up the console and no keyboard input seems to be active. If I power cycle, then, another time, it starts up fine. Has anyone else seen this kind of behavior? Any ideas about what I can check to see what the failure is?

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

Yes it is a known USB 3 problem. Disable xhci in bios and it goes away. There are probably 2 places it needs to be turned off.

 

[Steven McKelvey]

Thanks, Michael. It's good to know at least that it is a known problem. I don't see anywhere in my BIOS that I can turn it off, so at least I can hope that it may (or may not) be fixed in some future version unless it is inherently a USB3 thing and not a FreeNAS thing. Appreciate the info.

 

[Dusan]

I don't think this is USB3 related. When your USB3 controller is not compatible with the xhci driver then FreeNAS doesn't boot at all. As I understand it in your case it sometimes boots, sometimes not.
Does it hang also on cold boots or only during reboots? If it happens only on reboots try adding a hw.usb.no_shutdown_wait=1 sysctl (Sysctem->Sysctls).

 

[Steven McKelvey]

It really isn't a random thing, it seems to be an exactly every other power cycle thing. System board is MSI H87-G43, I don't see any settings in the bios that would allow me to turn off xhci. When it fails it locks up hard and requires a power off and power on and then it boots up properly.

 

[cyberjock]

Some Haswell chips don't work well with FreeBSD yet. They cause problems after a reboot forcing you to do a cold boot every time. It could also be something on your motherboard. Next time consider reading the stickies and buying one of the recommended Supermicro boards to avoid problems.

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

The Supermicros have this same problem if xhci is enabled. But it is a haswell issue.

But isn't the h87 board a non-ecc board?

 

[cyberjock]

Pretty sure it is, but I'm done trying to warn people.. you can only lead a horse to water.

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

It isn't. @Steve: your motherboard is not really suitable for a Freenas due to missing ecc support. Check out the hardware thread for some good suggestions.

 

[cyberjock]

Sorry, I meant "it is" as in it's a non-ecc board. :O

 

[Steven McKelvey]

Thanks for the information. But I'm guessing it is a software issue, I upgraded to FreeNAS 9.2.0 and the problem seems to have gone away. No other changes were made to the BIOS settings (xhci isn't something I can turn on or off). I'll keep an eye on it, but it appears to start up reliably every time now.

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

That's great. Have fun with your box.