New Laptop: 14.2 installer panics

[sgharms]

New Asus Zenbook! after generalized "Don't use your ancient laptop" messages. Fair enough. Buy new laptop.

Part I:

Try with 14.1 installer image I had on hand

(boots up to installer, but doesn't see network card, but did let me pick which components to install)

OK, then research AX211 card and see that it's mentioned in the 14.2 release notes.

Part II:

Make a new 14.2 usb image

1. Download FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img
2. dd it to USB

% sudo dd if=FreeBSD-14.2-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/disk4 bs=1M conv=sync status=progress
  1553989632 bytes (1554 MB, 1482 MiB) transferred 531.032s, 2926 kB/s
1488+0 records in
1488+0 records out
1560281088 bytes transferred in 531.373004 secs (2936320 bytes/sec)

3. Boot off of USB
4. Beastie head menu!
5. Click 1 install ==> Panic

Part III

1. Reboot. Boot to single user /bin/sh shell ==> Success

OK, so, based on my understanding: we made it to hardware init, but when we started to do the rc, we load something that panics us.

Part IV

Make video of boot up before panic

Autolaoding module: if_iwlwifi

many Could not load /boot/firmware/path-to-module errors interspersed with

iwlwifi0: could not load firmware image 'some-image'
iwlwifi0: File size way too small!

Hm, that seems unlikely as dd, above, seemed to have done the thing properly.

Attached image shows what I have.

The final error message seems to point to git://git.kernel.org and that feels...wrong as I'm not running Linux? But is probably a generic message since this is a driver that was "initially based on upstream Linux iwlwifi-next repository along with the firmware from linux-firmware.git"

Later on in the boot cycle I see that loopback interface has come up but not the iwlwifi. Ok that seems to confirm the driver wasn't loaded.

Screenshot attached.

It seems like the panic happens shortly after devd initializes (Screenshot attached).

The final screenshot is the panic itself.

Any advice on how to proceed? Ideas I have are:

1. This has been seen before and X....
2. This has been seen before and copy the driver from ... and put it on your USB key and manually load it at point ... and then you'll be able to install and after that's done then you'll get the latest stuff and life will be sweet
3. You can manually create a bootable iso image by following $SOME_GUIDE
4. Congratulations (™) you've found a new bug! Please open an issue at ... and, in the meantime, try ...

I'm sad that my ancient machine Just Worked for the install and boot up, but I'm hopeful to soon be applying allll thoooose CPUs to helping to FreeBSD things (bhyvically).

 

[USerID]

Disable "unnecessary" devices in BIOS. Try installing the system from a flash drive. Maybe at least the basic system will work...
Then return these devices one by one to BIOS.
And your laptop is not that old (2011?). My ASUS is even older and works with the basic system perfectly.

 

[drsnx60]

looks like iichid driver crash while accessing the Elantech trackpad.
ELAN 9008 is probably your trackpad. the iichid driver is the I2C Bus driver.
I Have a Laptop ( Fujitsu Celsius H7510 ) with an elantech trackpad. that the laptop has connected as the Mouse device.
so inorder to stop freebsd to try to access the trackpad as a trackpad and as a mouse insted. I had to do do this in /boot/loader.conf :

hw.psm.synaptics_support="0"
hw.psm.elantech_support="0"

Do you really need the iichd driver running ?

The Iwlwifi driver is beeing rapidly developed presently and the firmwares have been moved to a package.
/usr/ports/net/wifi-firmware-iwlwifi-kmod
these updates are not in 14.2 release.
they are present in 14.2 stable and 14.3 Beta.

 

[sgharms]

After a lot of work and some help from ChatGPT and drsnx60 's insight, here was my path to an installation:

set hint.iichid.0.disabled="1"
set hint.hidbus.0.disabled="1"

By passing these as boot hints I was able to get to the installer. I wound up adding the distribution packages to the image so that I could have them local and successfully complete an installation. With that in place, I was able to boot up. After that, there was a lot of fiddling to USB key over a firmware. Nevertheless, every time devmatch ran, it induced panic. So I disabled devmatch and explicitly loaded my firmware and everything is working fine. I'll debug devmatch later.