Boot from thumb drive hangs on HPE Gen10 uServer

[RAWelsh]

Encountering issue with installing FreeNAS v11u4 on HPE Gen 10 Microserver. I am unable to boot from USB thumb drive to implement install. I am running American Megatrends BIOS 5.12 on an AMD StoneyCPU and booting in Legacy mode.

I have used some previously reported steps to move the boot process forward partially. These include:

1) A thread originated by Rafal Lukawiecki titled “Installer hangs during boot (11.1 on AMD)”. The entry from FUNTOWNE in the thread listed adding hw.pci.realloc_bars=”1” during the loader process. This got me past the same point Rafal had encountered a hang on the same type server.

2) Changing the vfs.mountroot timeout per another post from the default 180 to 80000 also moved my boot process past the point where I was unable to complete mountroot.

I have hit another snag during boot and am wondering if anyone has an idea.

Here are the last 11 lines of output to the monitor before the system hangs:

mountroot: waiting for device /dev/msdosfs/FREENAS…
(probe:umass-sim0:0:0:0): INQUIRY. CDB: 12 00 00 00 24 00
(probe:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error
(probe:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Retrying command
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus 10 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Kingston DataTraveler 3.0 PMAP> Removable Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
da0: Serial Number 0014857749E5BE41876E215D
da0: 400.000MB/s transfers
da0: 15000MB (30720000 512 byte sectors)
da0: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>
random: unblocking device.

Here is the text of my loader.conf file:

#
# Boot loader file for FreeNAS
#
autoboot_delay="2"
loader_logo="%NANO_LABEL_LOWER%"
loader_menu_title=" "
loader_version=" "
loader_brand="%NANO_LABEL_LOWER%-brand"

vfs.root.mountfrom="cd9660:iso9660/FreeNAS"

# The following delay during mounting of root file
# system is needed because mounting of an IPMI CD-ROM
# sometimes slow.
vfs.mountroot.timeout="80000"

# Switch ZVOLs into "dev" mode, skipping GEOM.
vfs.zfs.vol.mode=2

# Disable unused GEOM labels based on disk serial number.
# Multiple providers for exactly the same disk may create confusions.
kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable="0"

# Disable AHCI Enclosure support, not wired anywhere now.
hint.ahciem.0.disabled="1"
hint.ahciem.1.disabled="1"

# Increase dmesg buffer to fit longer boot output.
kern.msgbufsize="524288"

# Prefer newer mrsas(4) to mfi(4) for controllers supported by both.
hw.mfi.mrsas_enable="1"

# Don't wait for USB detach when rebooting. We may wish
# to investigate this further.
hw.usb.no_shutdown_wait=1

# Added for HPE Gen10 Microserver
hw.pci.realloc_bars="1"

 

[dlavigne]

If you are unable to resolve this on 11.1, create a bug report at bugs.freenas.org and post the issue number here.

 

[RAWelsh]

Update... I went back to FreeBSD11.1 and burned memstick.img file to thumb drive and all I needed to change for loader variables was setting hw.pci.realloc_bars=1. Didn't need to change timeout with this image. Was able to boot fine from FreeBSD. I am going to experiment a bit more with FreeNAS 11.1 image to see if I can sort this out, but there may be some issue with the FreeNAS iso on this machine. Will follow up when I have more.

IF anyone has any other ideas, please let me know.

 

[RAWelsh]

Summary. There is some issue with booting the HPE Gen10 Microserver from USB thumb drive. However, I was able to pull out a external DVD burner, burn the iso image to a CDROM, and boot the server from CD to install. The only change to loader parameters I needed to use was adding the hw.pci.realloc_bars=1 variable to the boot process. From there, I was able to install FreeNAS on the server with no issue. Once installed and booting from the drive on the server, I just needed to modify the loader.conf file to add the hw.pci.realloc_bar=1 variable to the loader, and now the system is booting just fine. I expect the rest of the server features should work just fine.

 

[RAWelsh]

If you are unable to resolve this on 11.1, create a bug report at bugs.freenas.org and post the issue number here.

Hello dlavigne. I can go ahead and submit a bug report, but I thought I'd ask you to take a look at my summary to let me know if that is what I should do. Since I was able to boot FreeBSD 11.1, I expect FreeNAS 11.1 is on the same build. So, I am not quite sure what to report as a bug.

Thoughts?