While moving a pair of ZFS disks from an *very* old motherboard to a new one, I ran into an odd problem I had not seen before.? The box was running just fine RELENG_10 from FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE #18 r279918 on 10yr old MB. Boots normally and expected speeds for old hardware/CPU.? But on the new one, as soon as the |\-/|\ starts spinning, it looks like its 1/100th of the speed it should be.? Unfortunately, we didnt have the luxury to wait for it to boot up all the way.? We put the disks back in the old motherboard, did the RELENG_11 upgrade which included putting in the new boot blocks after zpool upgrade and then the disks booted just fine in the new box.? We at first thought it was a hardware issue, but same behaviour on another new MB, new SATA cables etc etc. Any idea what was going on behind the scenes that might have caused it ?? Is there something about the way the old boot blocks would interact poorly with new motherboards (in this case, a SuperMicro X11SSH-F) ? ??? ---Mike
31.07.2019 22:30, mike tancsa wrote:> While moving a pair of ZFS disks from an *very* old motherboard to a new > one, I ran into an odd problem I had not seen before. The box was > running just fine RELENG_10 from FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE #18 r279918 on 10yr > old MB. Boots normally and expected speeds for old hardware/CPU. But on > the new one, as soon as the |\-/|\ starts spinning, it looks like its > 1/100th of the speed it should be. Unfortunately, we didnt have the > luxury to wait for it to boot up all the way. We put the disks back in > the old motherboard, did the RELENG_11 upgrade which included putting in > the new boot blocks after zpool upgrade and then the disks booted just > fine in the new box. We at first thought it was a hardware issue, but > same behaviour on another new MB, new SATA cables etc etc. > > Any idea what was going on behind the scenes that might have caused it > ? Is there something about the way the old boot blocks would interact > poorly with new motherboards (in this case, a SuperMicro X11SSH-F) ?Maybe it attempted dual-console boot involving output to serial port...
mike tancsa wrote on 2019/07/31 17:30:> While moving a pair of ZFS disks from an *very* old motherboard to a new > one, I ran into an odd problem I had not seen before.? The box was > running just fine RELENG_10 from FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE #18 r279918 on 10yr > old MB. Boots normally and expected speeds for old hardware/CPU.? But on > the new one, as soon as the |\-/|\ starts spinning, it looks like its > 1/100th of the speed it should be.? Unfortunately, we didnt have the > luxury to wait for it to boot up all the way.? We put the disks back in > the old motherboard, did the RELENG_11 upgrade which included putting in > the new boot blocks after zpool upgrade and then the disks booted just > fine in the new box.? We at first thought it was a hardware issue, but > same behaviour on another new MB, new SATA cables etc etc. > > Any idea what was going on behind the scenes that might have caused it > ?? Is there something about the way the old boot blocks would interact > poorly with new motherboards (in this case, a SuperMicro X11SSH-F) ?I have SuperMicro X11SSH-F and X11SSW-F too and I found this slow boot very annoying. We were running 10.x on them for about 2 years and as I found it was able to boot 10.x system with 11.x loader I deployed 11.x loader on all of them to workaround this issue. (must be redeployed after each 10.x update) My original notes include these links: http://smyck.net/2016/06/15/freebsd-slow-zfs-bootloader/ https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2016-June/084863.html Jan Bramkamp said: "The bootloader disk caching. The old code doesn't work (well) on modern UEFI implementations. You can get acceptable bootloader performance with the FreeBSD 10.3 EFI bootloader on such boards. Even the UEFI install images contain fallback BIOS bootcode and some boards prefer the old BIOS bootcode. On such boards you have to suffer through the slow boot process once to install FreeBSD." Miroslav Lachman