Now Available: pfSense® Plus 25.07-RELEASE

[jos-andel]

Upgraded from 24.11 to 25.07 on our spare Netgate 7100 unit. We always do this for testing, and so far it looks good.

But after the upgrade monitoring complains:
SWAP CRITICAL - 0% free (0 MB out of 0 MB) - Swap is either disabled, not present, or of zero size.

And monitoring is probably right, since there seems to be no more swapspace after the upgrade:
[25.07-RELEASE][admin@spare7100]/root: swapinfo
Device 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity

On my other units which still are on 24.11 I get:
/dev/ada0p2 1048576 0 1048576 0%
/dev/ada1p2 1048576 0 1048576 0%

On my upgraded box /etc/fstab still has the entries for swapspace:

Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#

/dev/ada0p2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/ada1p2 none swap sw 0 0

When I run 'swapon -a' on command-line, the swap activates and monitoring turns green once more.

Is this intended to be this way, or a bug maybe, or just bad luck this boot ?

Tomorrow I can try another reboot, see what happens then.

Jos Andel

[stephenw10]

Nope that's not expected. SWAP should be enabled by default if it's present. Are you running UFS or ZFS?

[jos-andel]

@stephenw10
We are running on zfs. Today I rebooted to test if I could reproduce it, after this reboot still no swapspace and another alert in the monitoring. So looks like reproducable.

Thanks, Jos

[stephenw10]

Do you see any errors at boot? Have you ever made any custom changes to the SWAP setup?

[jos-andel]

@stephenw10
We never changed swap setup. Always upgraded through the normal upgrade procedure. From version 23 to 25.

In my dmesg boot output:
module_register_init: MOD_LOAD (ipw_bss_fw, 0xffffffff80760600, 0) error 1
module_register_init: MOD_LOAD (ipw_ibss_fw, 0xffffffff807606b0, 0) error 1
module_register_init: MOD_LOAD (ipw_monitor_fw, 0xffffffff80760760, 0) error 1
module_register_init: MOD_LOAD (iwi_bss_fw, 0xffffffff8077fdd0, 0) error 1
module_register_init: MOD_LOAD (iwi_ibss_fw, 0xffffffff8077fe80, 0) error 1
module_register_init: MOD_LOAD (iwi_monitor_fw, 0xffffffff8077ff30, 0) error 1

But nothing related to swap.

[stephenw10]

Yeah those errors from the wifi drivers are normal when the hardware isn't present.

Hmm, I wonder if this is because you have multiple SWAP devices.

Try running: /bin/cat /etc/fstab | /usr/bin/grep swap | /usr/bin/awk '{ printf $1 }' | /usr/bin/head -n 1

That's what the RC script runs to get the swap device, if it returns something unexpected it may fail.

Do you see /tmp/fstab.swap present?

[jos-andel]

@stephenw10
I think you're onto something.

25.07-RELEASE][admin@vpnspare.mgmt.blah]/root: /bin/cat /etc/fstab | /usr/bin/grep swap | /usr/bin/awk '{ printf $1 }' | /usr/bin/head -n 1
/dev/ada0p2/dev/ada1p2[25.07-RELEASE][admin@vpnspare.mgmt.blah]/root:

cat /tmp/fstab.swap
/dev/ada0p2/dev/ada1p2 none swap sw 0 0

That doesn't look like a correct device, so it's quite likely that this breaks it. We have 4 Netgate 7100's which are like this, with two SSD's built in. We got them delivered like this, no modifications done (except for a broken PSU two times).

On 24.11 it works just fine, and probably on all previous versions we used as well in the past 3 years or so.

On 24.11 it looks like this:
/root: swapinfo
Device 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity
/dev/ada0p2 1048576 0 1048576 0%
/dev/ada1p2 1048576 0 1048576 0%
Total 2097152 0 2097152 0%

root: cat /tmp/fstab.swap

Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#

/dev/ada0p2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/ada1p2 none swap sw 0 0

Thanks, Jos

[stephenw10]

Aha! Ok let me do some digging here....

[stephenw10]

Ah, already reported in 2.8: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/16232

Looks like an easy enough fix though. Patch incoming....

[stephenw10]

Ok this works for me: 175.diff

It's a very simple (one character!) change so you might just manually edit the file. Let us know if you're able to test that.

[jos-andel]

@stephenw10

Just tested the patched pfSense-rc on our spare unit.

/etc: diff pfSense-rc.org pfSense-rc
590c590
< SWAPDEVICE=/bin/cat /etc/fstab | /usr/bin/grep swap | /usr/bin/awk '{ printf $1 }' | /usr/bin/head -n 1

SWAPDEVICE=/bin/cat /etc/fstab | /usr/bin/grep swap | /usr/bin/awk '{ print $1 }' | /usr/bin/head -n 1

Works like a charm:
: swapinfo
Device 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity
/dev/ada0p2 1048576 0 1048576 0%
/dev/ada1p2 1048576 0 1048576 0%
Total 2097152 0 2097152 0%

: cat /tmp/fstab.swap

Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#

/dev/ada0p2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/ada1p2 none swap sw 0 0
[25.07-RELEASE][admin@arn1-ops-vpnspare.mgmt.sidn.nl]/etc:

[mvikman]

@stephenw10

I'm planning to upgrade, but still on 24.11 and I have ZFS mirror with GEOM mirrored swap, would this problem affect my system or is it just for systems with multiple separate (non-mirrored) swap partitions on the both drives?

[stephenw10]

Try running the new command in 24.11: /bin/cat /etc/fstab | /usr/bin/grep swap | /usr/bin/awk '{ printf $1 }' | /usr/bin/head -n 1

If that returns a valid device it will be fine in 25.07.

Either way it won't prevent you upgrading. And you should just be able to apply the patch afterwards to regain SWAP. If you need it.

[mvikman]

@stephenw10
It returns "/dev/mirror/swap" so guessing it should be ok.
Never had pfSense using any swap, but better safe than sorry... :)

[stephenw10]

Yup should be fine.

[jos-andel]

@stephenw10

As expected, also works just fine on 25.07.1-RELEASE.