PFSense hangs on reboot

kitdavis · Dec 22, 2009, 2:48 AM

I have pfSense running on a number of different pieces of hardware with no problems. Today, however I ran into problems installing the 1.2.3 release on 3 machines. In each case, the install works flawlessly, until the final reboot. The processes and tasks are shut down and the reboot process starts. The monitor reports "no signal" but the reboot never occurs. A hard restart gets the system back up and running, but subsequent reboots hang. I've disabled everything non essential in the bios with no change in behavior. I did a quick unbuntu server install on one of the boxes and the reboot happens normally but as soon as I install pfSense the problem reappears. Any ideas would be appreciated.

jan.gestre · Dec 22, 2009, 1:24 PM

Have you tried disabling acpi?

kitdavis · Dec 22, 2009, 2:01 PM

That was the first thing I thought of trying (after reading the forums). Unfortunately the motherboard in all the machines is an intel serverboard S875-WP1-e which doesn't have any option to disable ACPI. I'm pretty sure I have used this same board before in other builds without this problem.

jan.gestre · Dec 22, 2009, 2:28 PM

@kitdavis:

That was the first thing I thought of trying (after reading the forums). Unfortunately the motherboard in all the machines is an intel serverboard S875-WP1-e which doesn't have any option to disable ACPI. I'm pretty sure I have used this same board before in other builds without this problem.

During the boot up sequence choose "Boot pfSense with ACPI disabled" instead of the default, I've a similar problem way back and I can't figure out why the boot sequence hangs, I'm not sure though if it's applicable in your case, anyways there's no harm in trying.

jimp · Dec 22, 2009, 3:07 PM

try this before a reboot:

sysctl -w hw.acpi.handle_reboot=1

If the resulting reboot works, add:

hw.acpi.handle_reboot="1"

To /etc/sysctl.conf

From acpi(4):

hw.acpi.handle_reboot
Use the ACPI Reset Register capability to reboot the system.
Default is 0, use legacy reboot support. Some newer systems
require use of this register, while some only work with legacy
rebooting support.

kitdavis · Dec 22, 2009, 4:37 PM

hw.acpi.handle_reboot=1 does not work, but booting with ACPI disabled does - so the easy solution is to figure out how to disable ACPI in the boot up process by default. (although this seems a bit like a kludge)

jimp · Dec 22, 2009, 4:41 PM

ACPI can be disabled as follows:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Disable_ACPI

It is a bit kludge, but on some systems it is necessary.

kitdavis · Dec 22, 2009, 4:47 PM

Found the setting in the book - making changes in /boot/device.hints I will try this and report back.

kitdavis · Dec 22, 2009, 5:10 PM

Disabling ACPI in the device.hints file works. Thanks to all for the help on this.