Re: boot loader blank screen

On Mon, 4 Jan 2021 08:22:56 -0800
John Kennedy <warlock_at_phouka.net> wrote:

> This is a little weird.
> 
> Somewhere between 13.0-g2ff66a915526 (Dec 30th) and -gd03fd8ede2c4 (Dec 29th),
> I've lost the screen in the boot loader.  This is really weird because I
> didn't update the boot loader (in quite a while, actually), but I suppose it
> might drag some stuff off of the disk and misbehave.
> 
> But the system boots, presumably after the countdown that I can't see, I just
> have to SSH in from a different machine to tweak things.  Just no screen at
> all past the GELI encrypted disk password prompt (and some usual noise as
> it complains about some padding that I've seen forever).
> 
> I used to just upgrade the boot loader around ZFS upgrades, and I haven't
> done that since OpenZFS got merged.  I just got overly conservative there
> and may have missed the "all clear" for all combinations of ZFS and the
> bootloader recognizing them.
> 

I had this problem also after I updated my sources this morning in
Germany and decided to make a new kernel and world.  I then booted the
new kernel and did installworld, after which I rebooted with the new
kernel and saw that the console disappeared after the BTX Loader
output appeared.

So I logged in using ssh and looked under /boot.  There were 52 files
which had been newly installed, all of them related to booting.

Luckily, I had a backup of /boot which I'd made on January 1. 
Restoring the backup got me back my console.

I have no idea which of the newly installed files caused the console
to disappear.  Note that my loader.conf was not modified.  And also
that I still use 4th rather than lua.

I tried using both sc and vt, but the console still failed to appear.

> The git logs in /usr/src aren't time-sequential, so maybe I shouldn't trust
> those dates above (I pulled it ~Jan 3rd and let it compile overnight), but
> I'm going to repull all the sources and recompile, just in case.  I might
> have initiall pulled it during the git conversion and maybe it is confused.
> 

-- 
Gary Jennejohn