Re: 64-bit pi 3 grief

[Paul Mather <bsd-lists%gromit.dlib.vt.edu@localhost>]

On Nov 2, 2020, at 1:52 PM, John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost> wrote:

>> Now I hit two problems:
>> #1: the kernel doesn't wait for the sd0 to come online and instead
>> prompts for the root device (I hit this long ago on an odroid, and the
>> SSD was a workaround ...)
> 
> Add this to config.txt on your MS-DOS partition on the SD card:
> 
> # Waits a while so spinning rust disk has time to spin up
> boot_delay=10


I have this same issue, which, like the OP, did not manifest when the external drive was an SSD.  Now that it is a spinning disk (that tends to spin down when idle), I have the same problem with the OS not finding the boot drive when booting and so I have to specify it manually.  In my case, I am specifying a wedge in my cmdline.txt file, not the underlying partitions.

The above workaround (boot_delay) does not work for me.  I suspect it is delaying boot before the OS is loaded (i.e., at U-Boot).  Unfortunately, it's only when the OS probes for the wedges that the device spins up, which, by then, is too late and I get dropped into the prompt for the root device.

On FreeBSD/arm I can use the kern.cam.boot_delay setting in /boot/loader.conf to have the OS wait a number of milliseconds for device probing to finish.  That solved the problem of devices slow to spin up.  Is there a similar setting for NetBSD?

Cheers,

Paul.