jgreco
Resident Grinch
- Joined
- May 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,680
When you said you had multiple boot sequences in your BIOS, I think I know what's going on. Your BIOS likely has a timer where a reboot that occurs shortly after a previous boot, and before the timer expires, is considered a failed boot, and triggers the error boot sequence. TrueNAS updates usually complete within 60 seconds, which is likely shorter than your BIOS timer.
Interesting theory. Bonus points for it fitting the general facts here. I was not too happy with the "unknown mechanism causes BIOS to do something not-normal" I previously outlined, since a reboot's a reboot's a reboot. But yeah, if it was seeing rapidly successive reboots as a failure ...
Easy way to test this MIGHT be:
When you get to the boot loader screen, select "reboot" and see what happens.
Or better yet, select "singleuser mode" and then run "reboot".
Obviously making sure you do this very quickly in both cases.
I like it. I'd been thinking of it as a "how would data exit the ecosystem" problem, which is actually something I've been wrestling with using bhyve as a system image generation platform. There's an obvious way to get a one-bit signal out of bhyve that isn't generally applicable to real machines, but such a specifically targeted result on a real machine instigated by a host OS would seem to require very specific arrangment with the BIOS... @Samuel Tai's theory obviously works much better as it becomes an entirely external-to-FreeNAS issue triggered by a quick reboot cycle.