[Solved] Attempt to Upgrade to Opnsense 26.7 hangs on reboot at "masks"

[meyergru]

It seems like with the new kernel, there are now race conditions with the early microcode loading under certain conditions. For me, it was the presence of vidconsole (but I did not check if that problem would prevail if the microcode update was disabled - I still have it running).

I think that the recent kernel changes of memory layout and such is responsible for that, although at times, it even surfaced earlier than with 26.7: https://github.com/opnsense/ports/issues/230. Whatever the specific condition is, it seems that the early loading is always part of the problem, so disabling that should fix it.

Alas, since many mainboard manufacturers do not supply microcode updates in the BIOS and it seems there is no way of doing the microcode update even earlier in FreeBSD, there is currently no fix for this situation other than to disable os-cpu-microcode-intel.

P.S.: Doing the update later via cpuctl is a tough decision, because:

1. There is code in the kernel that detects certain features at boot, which might change because of the update and cause problems.
2. Race conditions may occur when the update is being applied while other code executes, which is why the preferred way was early updates in the first place.