Bootloop, BSD11.1 vs. 11.2, uefi

[jr-firewall]

Hi Folks, was not certain where to put this so trying General.

I'm in the process of catching up some backlogged updates. When going from OPNSense 18.7 to 19.1, which I believe involves an underlying upgrade from BSD11.1 to BSD11.2, I get in a boot loop, the only way to get out of is by manually selecting the old kernel from the console.

Yes, I found this post: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=11674.msg52864#msg52864. Yes, I tried creating the file in /boot. It did not help. There is NO uefi option in the BIOS to change (we tend to run on old hardware).

Here is the question: is there some requirement for UEFI in BSD11.2? Anyone out there running OPNSense 19.1+ without it? Also, I did notice that my hard drive is formatted in the GPT style, rather than the MBR style; is it possible that the kernel sees that and ASSUMES there is a UEFI capability that is not there and freaks out? :-)

Thanks for your time.

[jr-firewall]

Hi again, all -

Believe it or not, I'm still futzing around with this. It is my HOME firewall, and is not my full-time job. It gets attention sporadically, usually on the rare occasion it bites us in the tush. We had one of those occasions recently.

I did a search in these forums, and stumbled across a (more recent than mine) relevant post from @thesohogeek: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=17351.0. Thanks so much! I enjoyed your humor (humour?) 

Since none of the devs here for OPNsense appears to be addressing this issue, I will be visiting the FreeBSD forums to see what is going on over there. This issue is keeping me stuck at 18.7, which is making me more uncomfortable as time moves on. We normally run the firewall on old hardware trickled-down from desktops as those get upgraded for various reasons. There is currently nothing wrong with this hardware, and barely breaks a sweat with our level of traffic. We don't need to spend $500US-plus to buy a new motherboard/CPU/memory. We just need firewall software that is happy to run without UEFI.

Any comments or work-arounds are welcome.