Please help! System broken by bad loader.conf.local

[Gcon]

Hi peoples.

I am super desperate and will pay someone to help me out here. I have had a high number of interface interrupts causing high CPU and I thought I'd try putting the following in /boot/loader.conf.local  (as recommended elsewhere):

hw.pci.enable_msix=1
hw.pci.enable_msi=0

Unforunately I cannot now boot as all my PCI devices "fail to allocate an interrupt"!

"Safe mode" is no help to me (yeah not very safe after all)
#3 loader prompt - have tried setting loads of things to no avail.

You'd think this would be easy but it's an absolute nightmare! A shame the website I got this from failed to mention the dangers of this. I have had days of building a new firewall config... now am left feeling absolutely shattered by this small yet devestating issue as I fear it might all be lost. I'm absolutely gutted.

Please help....I beg of you... please!

[Gary7]

Are you able to boot from a USB drive?
If you can boot FreeBSD from a USB drive, you could edit the file manually.

[franco]

Escape to boot prompt, use

set hw.pci.enable_msix=0
boot

Repeat with different settings for the vars until it works.


Cheers,
Franco

[Gcon]

Thanks guys!

I had already tried the following before posting and it didn't help:
set hw.pci.enable_msix=0
boot

...and...
set hw.pci.enable_msix=0
set hw.pci.enable_msi=0
boot

Today (after a good night's sleep) I tried this:
set hw.pci.enable_msix=0
set hw.pci.enable_msi=1

...and it worked!  Seems obvious in hindsight. Hope this helps a future searcher.

[Sirius1]

And after having had to rebuild systems before...backup ASAP so you have your existing working config in case you cannot get it restart for some reason later. At least if you have to reinstall from scratch, you'll have all your work saved.

Save early...save often....