Re: Booting an alternative kernel from loader prompt fails the first time only

On 4/20/2013 12:41 PM, Manfred Antar wrote:
> At 10:24 AM 4/20/2013, Rainer Hurling wrote:
>> On 20.04.2013 18:47 (UTC+2), Florian Smeets wrote:
>>> On 20.04.13 18:05, Steven Hartland wrote:
>>>> When trying to boot an alternative kernel from the loader prompt
>>>> it fails the first time the command is run but succeeds the second
>>>> time.
>>>>
>>>> Type '?' for a list of commands, 'help' for more detailed help.
>>>> OK boot kernel.generic
>>>> Booting...
>>>> don't know how to load module '/boot/kernel.generic/kernel'
>>>> OK boot kernel.generic
>>>> Booting...
>>>> /boot/kernel.generic/kernel text=0xd21288 data=......
>>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, I've been seeing the same thing for about 6-12 months maybe more.
>>> None of the people I asked were able to confirm, so I'm happy that I'm
>>> not imagining it :)
>>
>> I also can confirm this behaviour for month now (on 10.0-CURRENT amd64
>> with clang).
>>
>> Rainer
>>
>
> Have you tried:
> OK boot /boot/kernel.generic/kernel
>
> Use full path name always works for me
> Manfred
>

I couldn't get any other method to work.  I can also confirm this. 
While working with Adrian testing ath changes, I frequently had to 
reboot into an old kernel(/boot/ATH/kernel, full path seemed required) 
to regain networking unless I physically moved the computer to add ethernet.

Also, it's really annoying when I would have to manually kldload each 
module in order, especially opensolaris.ko and zfs.ko, and making sure I 
loaded /boot/ATH/if_ath.ko before /boot/ATH/if_ath_pci.ko or else the 
loader would load from /boot/kernel instead of /boot/ATH and I'd end up 
with broken networking even though the kernel was right.  I'd really 
love it if there were a way for modules to be bundled with the kernel 
file and loaded from the kernel instead of the filesystem, especially 
since many modules can't be compiled in.

As a side note, my /boot/loader is from -STABLE, mod time of January 24 
this year.  This could be an issue on -STABLE also.