Booting Options

Booting with a serial console

At the Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt.

At this point hit any key and you should receive a prompt. Then type:

set console=comconsole
boot -v

Disabling ACPI

At the Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt.

At this point hit any key and you should receive a prompt. Then type:

unset acpi_load 
set hint.acpi.0.disabled=1 
boot

After the installation, add the following line to /boot/loader.conf.local by running the following command from a shell prompt or exec.php:

echo "hint.acpi.0.disabled=1" >> /boot/loader.conf.local

Using a USB keyboard

If your having USB Keyboard trouble try this. Please note that pfSense now has a keyboard helper program that should help with this automatically.

For history on the issue refer to: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/errata.html

more updates on: 31 Oct 2004, updated on 5 Nov 2004) For FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/amd64, when installing FreeBSD 5.3 using an USB keyboard the keyboard will stop working once the kernel boots, because a PS/2 keyboard is always considered to be attached. As a workaround, select

At the Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt.

At this point hit any key and you should receive a prompt. Then type:

set hint.atkbd.0.flags="0x1"
boot -v

After the installation, add the following line to /boot/loader.conf.local:

hint.atkbd.0.flags="0x1"

Once the system is booted, you might find that your USB keyboard is unresponsive. Try unplugging it and then plugging it back in.

Disable DMA for IDE drives

You might have hardware that is not capable of using DMA transfers. You will see DMA errors when installing pfSense if this is the case. Disabling DMA support in BIOS might work. Another option is to disable DMA support at boot time. This will slow a DMA capable system down. It should only be used when you encounter DMA errors when accessing your hardware.

To disable DMA:

After powering on your system, You will see: Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt.

At this point hit any key and you should receive a prompt.

To disable DMA for hard drives and compact flash:

set hw.ata.ata_dma=0 

To disable DMA for optical drives:

set hw.ata.atapi_dma=0

After the installation, add the following line to /boot/loader.conf.local:

If you have to disable DMA for your hard drive(s):

 hw.ata.ata_dma=0 

If you have to disable DMA for optical drives:

hw.ata.atapi_dma=0

It is possible that you will have to disable DMA for both your hard drive(s) and optical drives.

Using VMware ESX (&GSX?) Server

This needs to be in your .vmx for the VM:

acpi.present="FALSE"
monitor_control.disable_apic="TRUE"

And you need to use the LSI (I think, not Buslogic - ie. not the default) controller, as well as the vlance card. Obviously, you should be on the latest ESX that supports FreeBSD (although technically with:

guestOS = "freebsd"

in your config, prior versions work too).

Customizing the boot environment

Pre-Flight Installer

The Pre-Flight Installer, aka 'pfi', is a set of scripts and configuration files which 'bootstrap' the install environment before the BSDInstaller starts. They consist of:

• pfi, an RCNG script
• pfi.conf, a configuration file
• installer, a shell script

The entire process, in a nutshell, is something like:

• The LiveCD boots.
• The boot process runs all the RCNG scripts in the order they dictate.
• Near the end of this process, pfi is run. It:
  • looks for the file pfi.conf, first on any MS-DOS formatted floppy disks that may be present, then on any MS-DOS formatted USB "keychain" disks that may be present, then finally in /etc. Any one of these configuration files only overrides the default settings from /etc/defaults/pfi.conf. If no pfi.conf file is found, all the defaults are used unchanged;
  • copies the configuration it is using to /etc/pfi.conf for convenience, so that it doesn't have to e.g. access the floppy again; and
  • does some special things based on the configuration it is using, for example, setting the root password or starting an sshd server. Please refer to /etc/defaults/pfi.conf∞ for a full list of pfi.conf settings.
• Next, the user logs in and starts the installer script. On some LiveCD's, this is as easy as logging in as a special user (for example, the "installer" user on the DragonFlyBSD LiveCD.)
• The installer script also reads its configuration from /etc/pfi.conf, which pfi may have copied there from a floppy etc.
• The installer script uses this configuration to determine which frontend to start.
• It then starts both the backend and frontend and waits for the backend to terminate.