[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.

[Wintrob-IT]

BryanC1968, you are the best!!!!!! i almost formatted the firewall for the upgrade :)

[BryanC1968]

BryanC1968, you are the best!!!!!! i almost formatted the firewall for the upgrade :)

Your Welcome.  Glad I could help someone else...  I did quite a bit of googling to find a fix for the problem.  I found some old forum posts either on this forum or on reddit from someone else having this same issue with one of the previous version upgrades.  And they found out that the cpu-microcode plugin was what was causing the issue, so I gave it a try and it worked...

[franco]

This is the late-loading change Patrick and Uwe have been asking about if anyone wants to try it:

https://github.com/opnsense/plugins/commit/506bbad4


Cheers,
Franco

[Patrick M. Hausen]

So instead of creating a new issue I added a comment now :-)

Thanks!

[franco]

It's not on master, please let me know how this works in practice.


Cheers,
Franco

[sAnDs]

Encountered this issue as well. Failed to upgrade with multiple attempts. Relied heavily on snapshots to recover.

In my case, I needed to remove plugins: os-cpu-microcode-intel, and os-realtek-re

Was able to successfully upgrade after all plugins were removed. Leaving these plugins uninstalled as I'm not sure they're relevant any longer.

After installing the os-cpu-microcode-intel plugin, there's a notice in the console output that states:

"This port is deprecated. Abandoned upstream, fails to identify anything remotely new according to upstream issue reports. It is scheduled to be removed on or after 2025-06-30."

Didn't reinstall the os-realtek-re plugin because I already have the FreeBSD realtek-re-kmod package installed. This is to provide support dual Realtek RTL8125 2.5GbE network adapters in the MeLE Quieter DL mini PC. The package automatically updated to the latest version with the upgrade to FreeBSD 15.

Hope this additional info is helpful.