FreeBSD boot hangs randomly "Root mount waiting for..."

Hi everyone,

I installed FreeBSD version 12.1-STABLE on a pretty old netbook (Intel based motherboard).
Many times FreeBSD boots up fine and I can work with it normally, but quite randomly system boot hangs on the following message:
Code:
Root mount waiting for: usbus4 CAM
It seems to be an issue with the webcam, that it's usb based. But this issue only occurs certain times while FreeBSD is booting.

I can not disable the webcam by using the bios utility. I'd really like to fix this issue, I guess some kernel parameter can do the trick. Any tips will be highly appreciated.
Cheers!
 
Hey guys,

Thank you for your responses.
This box is not booting from usb. This issue appears to happen 50% of boot times. That is why it is kinda "random".
I added hw.usb.no_boot_wait=1 to /boot/loader.conf and I saw the booting process getting stack while running /sbin/init as it can be seen on the snapshot attached. The behavior is pretty similar, it only fails some times, not always. Going to reverse hw.usb.no_boot_wait=1 change to see if I get the previous behavior.
 

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According to your attached screenshot your sata controller also fail to query the device. You may try to change your hard-disk to see if there's any difference.
 
Hey guys,

I enabled smartd and it does not report errors so far. I suspect it might be a boot time issue because those times when the box completes the boot I can startx, and run enlightenment with no issues at all.
boot mode is set to verbose. And kern.cam.boot_delay="2000" was also added to /boot/loader.conf as suggested by mjollnir. But still no luck half of the times boot get still stuck.
The machine is running multi-boot with grub2 and linux install on different partition (that linux works with no issue at all).
 
Sporadic failures are 99% due to bad hardware. 2nd, some controllers and devices (HDD/USB) have quirks encoded in the kernel (they do not 100% comply to standards). For shure Linux has similar things. Carefully inspect the verbose boot messages of your Linux system, to see if they have a quirk that FreeBSD does not have.
 
I would rather try to increase the delay, so that cam can finish probing.. Something like kern.cam.boot_delay="10000".

Or set "vfs.root_mount_always_wait=1" in
/boot/loader.conf

dmesg | grep usbus4 should tell you which usb device is causing the problems.
 
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