Tag Archives: zfs

Update FreeBSD to 14.0, Update zpool, and can’t boot…how to fix?

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As FreeBSD 13.2 is EOF and FreeBSD 14.0 is released, so I think it’s time to update my server to FreeBSD 14.

So I updated the server as what I did before.

freebsd-update -r 14.0-RELEASE upgrade
freebsd-update install
shutdown -r now
freebsd-update install

And when I also noticed that FreeBSD 14 updated zpool verson and introduce some new features, so I also updated zpool as well.

zpool upgrade zroot

And also updated bootcode on all disks, this is very important.

gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 da0
...
gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 da7

And the final step is to reboot the server to finish upgrade.

Then, server can’t boot. I got below error.

And gpart can find all disks and partition.

What’s happening? I updated bootcode why I still get this error?

And then I did some research, and found that in FreeBSD 14 release note, it’s mentioned

There have been a number of improvements in the boot loaders, and upgrading the boot loader on the boot partition is recommended in most cases, in particular if the system boots via EFI. If the root is on a ZFS file system, updating the boot loader is mandatory if the pool is to be upgraded, and the boot loader update must be done first. Note that ZFS pool upgrades are not recommended for root file systems in most cases, but updating the boot loader can avoid making the system unbootable if the pool is upgraded in the future. The bootstrap update procedure depends on the boot method (EFI or BIOS), and also on the disk partitioning scheme. The next several sections address each in turn.

Well, this is something new in FreeBSD 14, and I didn’t update EFI boot file and that’s why I’m facing this issue.

So, spend some time to fix the boot issue.

First, I tried to change bios from BIOS to UEFI, to see if I can boot the server via BIOS. But unfortunately, it’s not working, and got below error.

So, the only choice is to boot the server with liveCD and fix it.

Select 1, boot installer here. Do not select 2 single mode as single mode is readonly.

Select liveCD

Type root to login, no password is needed.

And then you can mount your zpool via below command (Actually this is not needed if you only need to fix the boot issue)

zpool import -f -R /tmp/zroot zroot

Keep in mind here the only writable folder is /tmp, so you must mount your zpool here.

Determined the location of the boot loader via below command:

efibootmgr -v.

The one with + is the one in use, in below screen shot as I boot from virtual CD so it’s marked as USB.

The one on local disk is mfisyspd0p1

Mount the ESP partition via below command:

mount_msdosfs /dev/mfisyspd0p1 /boot/efi

And then run below files to copy the EFI boot loaders from CD to local disk.


cp /boot/loader.efi /mnt/efi/freebsd/loader.efi
cp /boot/loader.efi /mnt/efi/boot/bootx86.efi

Then reboot,

Then I got an error complaint UEFI is broken.

Then tried to boot into livecd and copy the files again, then reboot.

This time no error, just complaint not able to boot.

So what’s happening?

I remember when I copied the EFI loader, there are some errors from the HBA card.

Then I checked the sha256 of the loader.efi on CD and on local disk, looks like the loader on local disk is corrupted.

This is a known issue for several years. The default drive in FreeBSD is not working properly with mfi driver (I’m using dell h330). So the fix is

Option 1, when you use livecd to boot, select 3 and enter below command to load the right mrsas driver:

set hw.mfi.mrsas_enable="1"

boot

 

Option 2, keeps copy the file to hard disk, and then use command sync to force OS to write data to disk.  And then check the sha256 of the file. Due to the default driver is not stable, I tried about 10 times, finally got the loader.efi copied to the right position.

Then reboot. This time server can boot successfully, but it booted into single mode.

That’s because we replace the file via livecd, so just run fsck to fix it

fsck /dev/da0p1

Then reboot, all good now.

 

expand AWS EC2 FreeBSD ZFS disk

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For testing purpose, I setup a Freebsd instance on AWS, which is using zfs on root.
And then I add 10G disk space to the root volume. Even though I enabled auto-expand for zroot, it seems the 10G space is not added to system. Here are the steps to expand the disk for zroot:

1. Reboot the server.  Even though it’s said that reboot is not necessary, I suggest to reboot the server to make sure server can recognize the new size.

2. As the disk size change, we need to fix the GPT partition table first.

gpart recovery ada0

3. Some documents said can use “zpool online -e” to expand the disk. As shown in above picture, the command can’t auto update GPT and assign the space to zfs partition.

4. We need to use gpart to update GPT first, then expand the zfs partition.

#gpart resize -i 2 ada0
#zpool online -e zrrot /dev/adap2

Increasing disk/zpool size of FreeBSDZFS disks in Linode

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I’m running a FreeBSD instance in Linode. And FreeBSD is not the official supported OS in Linode.The disk type is set to raw to install FreeBSD.

And recently Linode upgraded my instance and the disk size is increased from 40G to 80G.

But when I login to the system, I found that my zpool is still 40G. But the disk is shown as 80G.

# gpart show
=>       34  100663229  ada0  GPT  (80G) [CORRUPT]
         34          6        - free -  (3.0K)
         40       1024     1  freebsd-boot  (512K)
       1064        984        - free -  (492K)
       2048    4194304     2  freebsd-swap  (2.0G)
    4196352   96464896     3  freebsd-zfs  (46G)
  100661248       2015        - free -  (1.0M)

I tried to enable zfs autoexpand on my zpool, the same. Then how to increase the disk/zpool size?

First, re-write disk metadata

# gpart recover ada0
ada0 recovered

After this, gpart can show the real disk space info

#:~ # gpart show
=>       40  167772080  ada0  GPT  (80G)
         40       1024     1  freebsd-boot  (512K)
       1064        984        - free -  (492K)
       2048    4194304     2  freebsd-swap  (2.0G)
    4196352   96464896     3  freebsd-zfs  (46G)
  100661248   67110872        - free -  (32G)

Then, expand zfs partition

# gpart resize -i 3 ada0
ada0p3 resized

Then, expand the zpool

zpool online -e zroot /dev/ada0p3

Done!

#:~ # df -h /
Filesystem            Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
zroot/ROOT/default     74G     29G     45G    39%    /

Don’t forget to write zfs info to disk

gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 ada0

FreeBSD: use mrsas driver to replace mfi driver

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My server got a Dell PERC H330 raid card, and I made it’s working in HBA mode to make sure that it can get best performance under FreeBSD with zfs.
But every time when I boot the server, I’ll get below error message and it take a long time to pass the disk check stage.

1

After research, it seems this timeout error was caused by the old mfi driver.
And LSI has released a new mrsas driver for FreeBSD. So It’s better to switch the driver from mfi to mrsas.

First, add below line into /boot/loader.conf

mrsas_load="YES"

And then add below device hint into /boot/device.hints . This line is very important. Without this device hint, FreeBSD will use the old mfi driver for raid card even though you enabled maras drvier.

hw.mfi.mrsas_enable="1"

And then, add below line into /boot/loader.conf to disable disk id identity.

kern.geom.label.gptid.enable="0"
kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable="0"

Without above two line, after you switch from mfi to mrsas, all the disks will be shown as diskid-*****************。

And don’t forget to update /etc/fstab to change the swap partition from mfi*p* to da*p*. Otherwise you’ll lose your swap partition.

Then, reboot your server, and enjoy.

forget to update the bootloader when updating ZFS filesystems.

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Today, when I reboot my freebsd server. Server can’t boot. The error message is

ZFS： unsupported ZFS version 5000 (should be 28)
can't find /boot/zfsloader

default: ssd::/boot/kernel/kernel

boot:
can't find /boot/zfsloader

The problem is caused by that after I update zfs version, I should update bootloader at the same time.

Fix it:

Download the latest Freebsd 9.1 current image. Note:if you are using the stable image, the bootloader in the image is still old and can’t support zfs 29.

Then use the image to boot the server, then enter ‘shell’,run below command for all boot disks:

#gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 mfid0

then reboot the server