Re: Booting from usb hard disk

On Mon, March 30, 2009 03:10, Andrew Thompson wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 03:49:32AM -0500, Robert Noland wrote:
>> On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 19:40 -0300, Nenhum_de_Nos wrote:
>> > On Mon, March 23, 2009 07:36, Robert Noland wrote:
>> > > So I have my i386 install on a usb hard disk, which I can only boot
>> on
>> > > one machine now.  The one machine that I can make work has a bios
>> option
>> > > that reads "BIOS ehci handoff".  This used to work with the old usb
>> > > stack.  The machines that it doesn't work on, boot the kernel, but
>> fail
>> > > to mount root, giving me the forbidding mountroot> prompt, which is
>> > > immediately followed by the message saying that da0 is attached.
>> da0 is
>> > > however not listed in the available boot devices list.  I tried
>> playing
>> > > around with the timeout in vfs_mount.c, but that didn't seem to have
>> any
>> > > impact.  It has been suggested that this may be a "geom" timeout,
>> but I
>> > > don't know anything about the boot system really.
>> >
>> > I had problem a while ago with via mini itx hardware, that was quite
>> > close. If I try boot from usb (installed in usb hdd), I get to the
>> point
>> > of loader not finding my disk.
>> >
>> > I then used a small flash disk attached to the ata (44 pin ide)
>> channel
>> > and formatted /boot in there. this way I get to the point of mount
>> root
>> > you said, and da0 not being alive soon enough to mount root. list
>> disks
>> > also couldn't find da0 though.
>> >
>> > I tried current from that time, and no good.
>> >
>> > if this is solved, I'll be happy to try whatever patch to current. (as
>> > long as I can install it from another box/or its ata channel, as it
>> can't
>> > boot vanilla 7.1R)
>>
>> So, my solution was to set kern.cam.scsi_delay=10000
>> in /boot/loader.conf
>
> The following patch should work. It creates interleaving root hold
> tokens from the CAM probe to disk_create and geom providor tasting.
> I had to add a malloc type flag as sleeping isnt allowed at the point I
> added the token alloc in CAM.
>
> http://people.freebsd.org/~thompsa/root_wait.diff
>
> It needs review by the various geom/cam ppls.
>
>
> Andrew

sorry for the delay. I had work issues. Thanks for the patch, I'll try it
as soon as possible (plnas for Wednesday)

thanks,

matheus

-- 
We will call you cygnus,
The God of balance you shall be