Cannot boot kernel with SMP enabled

[kiokoman]

@tomlawesome
try with pfsense 2.5.0

[tomlawesome]

@kiokoman

Thanks, haha. Just edited to say that's what I'm about to do!

[tomlawesome]

@kiokoman

Regrettably, 2.5.0 shares the same fate as I expected:

panic: AP# 1 (PHY# 2) failed!

I think my only hope is a patched pfSense (FreeBSD) kernel and self-compiling.

[Gertjan]

Is this a "FreeBSD used by pfSense" issue or a FreeBSD issue ?
I mean, any of these work on your hardware ?

[tomlawesome]

@gertjan None of the older builds will boot, but I had missed the FreeBSD 13 development build, so will give that a shot now.

[tomlawesome]

@tomlawesome Regrettably, no dice with FreeBSD 13 either.

Also, re-posting original links somewhere they won't auto-delete after a few days so that they're there for the future:

1

2

[mcury]

SMT enabled in that CPU could be a security risk, I'm not sure if this problem applies to routers/firewalls, as they are only passing traffic..

MDS - Microarchitectural Data Sampling
TAA - Transactional Asynchronous Abort

Reference:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/mds.html
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/hw-vuln/

So, I would take a deep look into that, to confirm if the security risk really applies to pfsense, before enabling SMT.

Note that MDS and TAA cannot be patched, only way to fix is disabling SMT.

I spent some days reading about this last year, I'm not an expert ok? I could be wrong about this.

[tomlawesome]

@mcury said in Cannot boot kernel with SMP enabled:

SMT enabled in that CPU could be a security risk, I'm not sure if this problem applies to routers/firewalls, as they are only passing traffic..

MDS - Microarchitectural Data Sampling
TAA - Transactional Asynchronous Abort

Reference:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/mds.html
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/hw-vuln/

So, I would take a deep look into that, to confirm if the security risk really applies to pfsense, before enabling SMT.

Note that MDS and TAA cannot be patched, only way to fix is disabling SMT.

I spent some days reading about this last year, I'm not an expert ok? I could be wrong about this.

That looks different to Symmetric MultiProcessing - but I'm no expert either!

[mcury]

@tomlawesome Oh, SMP, somehow I read SMT in your topic, ehhe, don't know how that happened..
SMT would be Simultaneous multithreading

[tomlawesome]

@mcury said in Cannot boot kernel with SMP enabled:

@tomlawesome Oh, SMP, somehow I read SMT in your topic, ehhe, don't know how that happened..
SMT would be Simultaneous multithreading

Easy mistake to make! No harm done, and I learned something in the process!