[Soekris] pfSense on Soekris 6501?

[michael.sperber@active-group.de]

Jim Pingle <lists at pingle.org> writes:

> On 1/3/2012 2:45 AM, Michael Sperber wrote:
>> Jim Pingle <lists at pingle.org> writes:
>> 
>>> On 12/20/2011 2:42 AM, michael.sperber at active-group.de wrote:
>>>> I'm trying to get pfSense working on a 6501 with a Transcend mSATA
>>>> SSD. Unfortunately, at boot, I get read timeouts on the SSD when it
>>>> tries to mount the root filesystem.  The SSD seems fine under Linux and
>>>> under NanoBSD 9.0-RC3, so it may be a driver problem.  Any suggestions
>>>> on making this work would be much appreciated!
>>>
>>> What exactly does the mountroot error screen look like? 
>> 
>> I get a bunch of messages like so:
>> 
>> TIMEOUT - READ retrying (1 retry left) LBA=xxxx
>> 
>> Finally one goes
>> 
>> TIMEOUT - READ retrying (0 retry left) LBA=xxxx
>> 
>> and then the root mount is aborted.
>
> Is the LBA constant or random?

Random.

> Have you tried the "safe mode" boot option?

No.  I wasn't aware that did anything with the drivers - I'll try that
when I'm back in the office.

> For there I was mainly wondering if that option helped booting from the
> mSATA at all, not if it was booting from USB. If there was some kind of
> timing issue waiting for the disk to "settle" in some way, that delay
> might help.

Ah, OK.  I'll try that, too, when I'm back in the office.

> There could be some issues with the FreeBSD version on pfSense 2.0.x
> (FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE) and the mSATA card/controller, hard to really say
> for sure. It looks like someone else had the same kind of issue (
> http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,42028.msg221384.html#msg221384
> ) but I didn't see a real resolution in that thread.

Yup, that looks exactly like what I experienced, except I always reach
one timeout that the box doesn't recover from.

> Have you tried a FreeBSD install on that mSATA card? Might be
> interesting to see if 8.1 had the same issues, and if 8.2 or 9.0 might
> behave better.

You mean a full install rather than NanoBSD?  As I said, NanoBSD 9.0
runs fine.  (Which is why I'm hoping pfSense 2.1 mix address my issues.)

> We're working on getting the pfSense 2.1 builds going on FreeBSD 9 but
> have some other projects taking priority there. Once we get snapshots
> going on that line it would definitely be worth trying, but that will be
> a few weeks.

OK, that's good to know.  Thanks for your efforts!  (And pfSense *is*
the coolest thing since sliced bread!)

-- 
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla