pfSense

Stumbled into the same issue.

The old kernel can be booted as Jan stated by entering

boot kernel.old

when system is stuck in bootloader.

My workaround for now is to temporay restore the kernel.old to kernel:

1. cd /boot
2. mv kernel kernel.broken
3. cp -a kernel.old kernel

Rebooting the system works now.
Haven't noticed any issues when running with the old kernel,
but for sure this is suboptimal and issues might occur.

I have the same issue with Hyper-V under Windows Server 2019. I had to roll back to 2.4.4 (that was the latest .iso I still had as you don't allow download of past versions). I was able to get it to boot a couple of times by re-loading the menu (After it fails to boot type "menu" then enter), then that stopped working. Then I tried booting kernel.old and that worked once, then stopped working for some reason. The I had got it to boot that first time I had dumped the config so I just re-installed 2.4.4.

This also applies to pfsense 2.5.0. Also stalls on boot with input/output error.

Jan de Groot wrote:

After upgrade to 2.4.5_1, the boot fails with Input/Output error when loading the kernel. Tested on 2 VMs, both suffer this problem.
Booting kernel.old works fine. The kernel shipped with 2.4.5_1 is much larger than 2.4.5, probably the loader can't load it in the EFI environment

I have the same error. When i install 2.4.5 in gen2 - install is ok.
If i install 2.4.5-p1 - i cant install pfsense.